Our next poem commemorating National Poetry Month is by Caroline Berry Klocksiem (Poetry Fellow ’08), imagining the surreal meteorology of the American Plains, this very day, 75 years ago.
Enough to make the chickens roost at noon
April 14, 1935
Nervous bird chatter then flatlining hush
over miles the day grows dark as crow
The day so black the air was smoke
heavy like tarred black lungs, dark
enough to need a new name for black
The smoke built a wall just before
your face, the wall slashing light from our homes
and darkness broadcast its siren for acres
Blackness swooping and swallowing like dry-as-a-bone
throat, black as pork blood, black as the long gone prairie,
black as long gone and black as seeping back
like the monster come back rolling out
from your dreams, well, just ask Old Job
how black or Jonah for that matter bigger than
behemoth, the belly of the whale turned insight out,
when the blizzard hit it gutted the day wide open
like brim, black insides gushing and tumbling to death
when the blizzard hit we’d finished the last drop of honey
when the blizzard hit it was 3 am at noon
when the blizzard hit it was the first and last day that black
blizzard forever like time, like testimony,
like not going nowhere, and black as a matter
of fact, as can’t hardly breathe, as pulling
our breaths together, counting them like the trees.
Originally published in Blood Orange Review 4.3
Caroline Berry Klocksiem is poetry editor at 42opus and teaches literature and writing at the University of Alabama and Holyoke Community College.
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