by Bobby Miller
Weathered
Weathered is how we might say resilient.
Cracked. Dust
-spattered. Wind -thrashed.
Flood might be a close-haunting of place.
I try not to stare
as the heavens fumble in their sequins—
the thread of one specific cloud
blisters the bay
until her bustle comes loose.
Shells sheen, anemone
dying species of stars scatter among the divide—
their wasting rolls faster
[faster!] along red tidelines.
A centrifugal crack snaps the sky wide
as the system haunts
much faster, imminent.
Luminosity dies away as the light
repels the haze— a viscosity
choked up storm
cells.
Even the cheap seats, further up
are battered drift-strewn
tidelines.
Imagine trying to make sense
of your world with the same metaphors.
The never-ending loop of it. Returning
and re-returning.
[Get out of the fucking tide!
I tell myself.
You cannot drink the whole storm.]
There
is nothing lovely left
that has not already been tested
measured, weighed
by the hand and the scale
a scale and a fin
in a hard rain—we already know
is gonna come
and come again
and come again
and come again
and and and
and the drops
will die off, set off.
[Pull yourself out of the cellar.
Peel off your own skin. Don’t leave it all
to sandblast winds]
Taste the season. No, wind.
No wind can force this window.
No winded alter self is running on her knees
or elbows. The grass isn’t bent under motor.
The hurricane winds don’t touch this state.
Not bent over backwards.
The roses and I have not been curved
by the rush of water or cloud formations.
No earthcrack. Tremor. No swallowing dust
will bow me to such a surf.
Imagine us on the dunes, displacing
our tidal roots.
Kari Flickinger is the author of The Gull and the Bell Tower (Femme Salvé Books, 2020). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the SFPA Rhysling Award. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley.
Bobby Miller is a librarian and amateur photographer. He has work forthcoming in Atticus Review. His website is bobbymillerphoto.com. With his wife, Sandie Friedman, he publishes a project combining photography and flash fiction: sandiebobby.com.