Protection

They told us the mountains protect us from tornadoes.

My midwestern mother and father who had seen

gray, conical serpents lash down from the sky.

What mountains?

The Appalachians’ old and bulbous spine?

Ground down and ancient – they can’t get it up anymore.

What protection?

During a tornado watch,

we jammed ourselves into the storage closet under the stairs,

among the cassettes of sermons from the 90s and before,

notebooks filled with observations on Leviticus and Jude,

reams of green-bar paper covered in binary or doodles,

baskets of clothing stained with dog shit,

old feather pillows forever damp with human oils,

the trash bags we didn’t throw out the day before.

Surrounded by,

cushioned in the scrap and litter,

I held the storage closet door closed as

everything tried to bulge its way out like an insistent birth.

Tensed upon our ruins, we waited the storm out,

and perhaps this is the one instance we were saved,

not suffocated by the hoard.