Everett Jones

Tornado Season

Clairvoyant, I’ll tell you, is what this jade sky
becomes. Like the preacher’s wife hauling ache
from her old bones, restless

wooden hulls of ships corrode, rot and grow their own biomes
under the salted sting of waves broken. This isn’t a sea story
and I can prove it—I like words up to my ankles

in wet grass, clover green left vibrant
from dew in the humid kind of shade that claims
your summers when you are young, when                        

it matters. And when the preacher knows it’s time, when his virtue
feels television static in her kneecap or the crook
of her arm, you’ll listen to the church

bells ring some dissonance bittersweet like end
-times, like the sight of an old tombstone with your exact last
name engraved, like your self-portrait in sidewalk chalk

reduced to rainbow sludge by the storm. And quickly rain
becomes hail, and hail becomes toy cars and marbles
on your first bedroom floor, and this is an updraft, and I say it

not to scare you, but to make sure you remember
in your flight that we are nothing
the earth can’t give, nothing the wind won’t take.

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Everett Jones is a Maryland writer in the Creative Writing Graduate Program at Salisbury University. His poems have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Harpur Palate and elsewhere.