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portrait of disaster that will repeat and repeat

(Note: this poem is a scrambling of language found in the New York Times article “Tornado Hits Missouri City, Killing Many” by Noam Cohen)
​​you can’t tell
what the danger is


see the storm
is difficult to read


it’s ravaged in a fire
a woman with a bathrobe


wrapped around her
it’s a knocking 


on a door frame
or a roof that is missing


a town is an overwhelming
isolation obscured by rain


it’s dark here after
the destruction 


the only light is reds
of an ambulance 


or electricity in a broken
connection we can’t reach 


anyone has been
steamrolled in this 


nation or national
tornado and rain 


bodies are people
blown across the hall 


unearthed from rubble
to be put back 


in the grave
in this state 


of emergency
​the numbers
Picture
Paper Tornado Base by jared is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Steffan Triplett is a Black, queer writer and educator from Joplin, Missouri. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis where he was a John B. Ervin Scholar. Some of Steffan’s work can be found in Longreads, Electric Literature, DIAGRAM, Fence, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Steffan has been a fellow for Callaloo and Lambda Literary.
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Issue Fourteen
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  • Home
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