The Weather Retort
I tell you thunder belly, cumulonimbus inner ear. Roil of pressure rising.
You reply insipid drizzle, muggy dew point skinned with gnatty scum.
You’re a supercilious mistral, stale windbag full of fug, shallow oil-slick
of a puddle. Don’t try diluting me to scattered showers, dismissed as just
some fitful tempest in a china cup. You ask if I’ve tried clear skies and common sense?
Batten down your stale toupée. No one wants to sniff your rehatched whiff, the dank
that underarms your ego. You’ve only seen my leading edge. In the calm before,
you could have sensed a supercell, a flanking line, an anvil, yet you never took
the time to overcast your eyes. Don’t you dare go back and diagnose me
with precipitation after rain is drenching down, advise that I should
see someone for my convective complex. Shut your
ornamental shutters. Tornado’s on its way.
This storm is coming in.
How to Go Out for a Drink
Walk in wearing hindsight, liquid liner, mirror glaze.
Keep shoulders down, each cuticle pushed back. Do not
drum the bar or slouch or twitch or cross your arms.
Someone will watch you suck stray whisps of nothing
through a technicolor straw. Bubble every adjective. Lip gloss
your conversation. No one will know you’re filled with boiling oil.
Use some snarky name you write across a napkin
when he asks: Terri Buldate. Shea Monhim. Ana Lias.
Phone number starting 555. Learn to smile while swallowing
stones. Prune bonsai with your teeth. Fill a pond with koi,
glance up, then drop your eyes and look away as ripples spread.
Rake each grain of sand until concentric circles wall around
a central stone. Now, deny the stone. Glue your poise
in place. Your eyelashes. Keep keys in hand, a razor filed
between your breasts. Ask for an Angel Shot, wingstripped.
When you leave, you’ll stir denuded feathers. Watch
them swirl in eddies at your feet, following your footfalls
as the door swings closed. Every echo, a plucked string.
Emergence Is Catching
Everywhere, the tunneled holes of sap-drunk cicadas,
their dormancy at last complete, emerging from
the warming earth. They surface, shed their
duller subterranean skin while all around them
air grows thick with rainstick thrums and chirrs
and tymbal music, drum bodies hollowed, quivering
on fences, branches, anywhere that they can vibrate,
venting thirteen years of pent-up lust. Males shake and rattle
like a brood of randy windup toys, scratching flint
to tinder with such fervor that I wouldn’t be
surprised if you and I, in listening, did not
wet our lips, did not also pulse and loosen,
shiver into buzz and turgid call, response
of mouth and parted thigh,
find what is winged and ready, fly.
Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist and dancer who now finds music in language. A two-time 2023 Best of the Net nominee, she is the founder/host of the monthly online reading Well-Versed Words. Widely published, Alison’s work is upcoming in Sky Island Journal, South Dakota Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorial services, takes singing lessons, walks in the woods, and dances in her kitchen. Find more at alisonhurwitz.com.
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