Anniversary of a Storm

Flossie Hedges

 

While you slept, the water ran to the core of the earth. It was a washing the wooden beams will always pay for. That’s what The Insurance said. Some assurance. The center of everything is fibers now, learning to talk again. Sogged, wobbly. Once, we had straight-backed holidays and arguments with hard angles. We had frames. We thundered in long lines. Who is at the door. Who is first to eat. Who will drown the dishes in the pool made opaque in revolutions. Who will see the floors at enough of a tilt that the dog’s pee gleams with a white edge, calls out for cleaning. Who will refill the cabinet rows, return things to their places. Now we are all soft and sleeping on springs.

 

what curves here

the yellow pine cradles

a living gray rain

Flossie Hedges is a writer, visual artist, and teacher living in the woods of southeastern Kentucky. She works at a small college that serves the Appalachian region. Her writing can be read in Untelling, EcoTheo Review, The Fourth River, Fruitslice, GARLAND, and Testament: A Rural Anthology, among others.