September 12, 2017

every roof, every door

I was eating scrambled eggs when the hurricane pummeled the southern tip
of Florida, a second cup of coffee steaming to my right. New Jersey had never
seemed safer or looked more pristine than from the aperture of a kitchen window
I did not have to shutter or otherwise abandon. A cable news channel was reporting live
from the imminent wreckage of Miami, Collins Avenue already flooded, and it came to me
that had this been a dozen years ago, my sister would have been in the thick of it,
and I, frantic on the phone. And then, it wasn't so hard at all to imagine even further -
a stadium floor studded with exhausted, anxious neighbors, the darkness, Earth's fury
dismantling every roof, every door, every thread of familiarity and ease. 
I crumpled at the table then, my heart breaking in a desperate refrain: "Please. Please."