DARREN HIGGINS

HOW TO NAME A HURRICANE

Weather is something you dig up
or try to bury my mother

said
I feel it lodged

in stone, myelin, in bark and wallpaper, in sickroom yellow
rings blooming

all across the ceiling tiles like water lilies on a gray pond
But she made the snow and wind

ache, the flooded fields, houses unmoored
and the blackening heat

forests
of pillars of smoke

Remember
she said gripping my face hard in her hands

hail battering the tin roofs of everywhere
dawn peach-gold and drowning in the still-drunk dark

Darren Higgins is a writer and artist living in Waterbury Center, Vermont. His poems and stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Quick Fiction, RAZED, Cosmonauts Avenue, Treehouse, Tupelo Quarterly, Bloodroot, The Rupture, Split Rock Review, and elsewhere.