Thunder, Lightning
Nancy Woo
It’s rained for the past three hundred days and I’m beginning to wonder if the sun has abandoned us. Favorite
red boots have a hole in them so these two feet have been stalling in the mornings. I stomp in the barn.
Clouds milling over cows. Looking out the window into my own barren white. The earth I see has two suns
on opposite poles, one for growing and one for loving under. I would rather the brighter one. Swampbeds
attract leeches. I am pulled toward the tension. Perhaps it will be this night forever. I have been dancing with
fireflies and filling canteens with a star’s distant murmur, as it calms one’s thirst. The cool water sighs down
my spine, twirling me through winter’s heat. Small blue fire speaking in licks, I wait for the light to slip
through the cracks again. What we wanted all along was peeping bright but we’ve been cooking in darkness
this whole dreary year. Icicles form on the tips of tongues slit. Firing, warming, scorching, steaming: hearth
stories break apart limbs when we tell them. Either combust or erupt, how long this wait is. Are we reaching
higher out or just smothering two hearts to death? The bed knows, but the sheets have stopped speaking to
each other. We have frozen over. The fire our enemy, just warm enough to forget the only way out. Afraid of the
squelch. But to get out from underneath this horrid rain, one must squish the boots asunder, feel the worms
in between the toes, and take a good look at the sinking cabin. Our meat is rotting in the basement. The flies
surround us. This was all new once, and now it is night. However it happened, the shades were drawn. Homes
do not last forever, even on sacred ground. Like all animals, get up, lift your seat, simply carry your weight away.
Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet from southern California who spends her free
time hitching a ride to the other side of maybe. Her work has been published
in The Subterranean Quarterly, Chapparal, Cadence Collective and Cease,
Cows, among others. You can follow her on Twitter @fancifulnance.
Photograph by Rebecca Dimovski