She looked up. “Bad weather to the south,”
he said. She was glad to be home.
She had just closed the door, when
a hailstone the size of a russet
potato fell into the yard, smashing the purple
and white petunias.

There was salt in the air from off
the limestone with its ground-down
ancient ones. An ocean was descending.
She could feel it slowly falling.

While she was sleeping, a car got swept
under an undertow, thousands of miles
from the Pacific Ocean.
All were saved.

An old man sighed and told his family,
who sat around his knee in the dark room,
about all the floods and storms he had lived
through – how it was really one storm
that kept coming back to finish the job.

A bear got pushed down the mountain
in a mudslide and ate out of a dumpster
all the rancid bits of goodness it could
stomach, before it lay down in front
of a sign that said “Exit.”

Lucy Simpson 6/7/2012