Whether
Winter whips
against the bricks,
a rogue current rattling
the chimney. Temperatures
plunge as storms steal
the sky, paling and impaling
fields, a tinseled evergreen
threatening to go
perpendicular in the gusts.
(In the South, where do
indigenous birds go
in bad weather?)
He tapes the windows
and braces himself
with the remote and beer,
while she--to feign adventure--
writes, I want to be a poem
when I grow up, secretly
embracing the idea of being
swept away like a cow
lifted from an Iowa farm
in a twister and dropped a thousand
miles later onto another roof
in a meat shower: stranger
things have happened,
the sound of her shattered
life ringing out its tinny chorus.