- Guilty and Reckless, I Try to Meet the Tornado Head On
Bicycle: hold my cards in your spokes for this dumb spin.
Indiana reminds me that right before the tornado, the world—
it’s all golden and fresh like a warm loaf of bread, like honey drizzled over every last thing, the cracks
in the sidewalks sticky with honey and the dogs would bend at once to lick it, the ants get stuck, the birds’ beaks stuck closed with sweetness.
Later, the dogs are full and I don’t eat, and I don’t eat, and then I try to think of something geometric and pleasing like a suspended staircase:
each of its steps held up by mathematics, tiny excuses and explanations science asks us to believe in.
Me: an ancient wheel,
a Fibonacci sequence: ammonite-me, hardened impression of the girl who used to be:
my slouch an apology rendered and re-drawn by nature—the sorry, sorry stuck to my surfacelike a slug. The tornado never touches down. Some consolation. [End Page 111]
Lindsey Alexander is a Kentuckian transplanted in the Hoosier state. She edits Lumberyard magazine. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Green Mountains Review, and Forklift, Ohio.