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| Illustration by Nate Beeler for the Washington Examiner |
rolls in, rumbles like children
wobbling cookie sheets to and fro:
tinny tremblings of puppet show storms.
After hail that sizzles, rain falling up
and moon shine scorching, thunder
smells of mica, tastes of worms, cracks
like inattention to detail, like sugar cookies
burnt around the edges. It thunders
like a blunder and jobs on the line,
your furloughed father bellowing
commands and punishments meted out
from the crimson of his fury, all four walls
closing in, biting the hairs on your arms.
Nowhere to brace your back but up
against the squeeze of the room.
Your hands fly up. Thunder howls —
a wolf pack searching for shelter,
the wall in the way. It screeches
like fault lines rubbing, sweats like caves
belching sulfur and blind fish, roars
like a love letter uncrumpling in the basket,
mocking your isolation. Thunder claps
a wave from someone you hate.
Mikki Aronoff’s work has appeared in The Lake, EastLit, Virga, Love Like Salt, Weaving the Terrain, Rise Up Review, Trumped!, bosque7, Love’s Executive Order, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Ekphrastic Review, SurVision, and elsewhere. A New Mexico poet, she is also involved in animal advocacy.
