portrait of disaster that will repeat and repeat
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(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 |
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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.