After the Tornado, the Checkout Clerk Considers Leaving

Some states, she knows, are red in fall

and smell like wooded general stores.

Some states are gray all the time, so nothing

newly gray can interrupt their integrity.

Some states wave their flags of birds

and handshakes, some offer peaches on arrival,

some promise eleven feet of snow,

which is a danger you can avoid

by sitting still. Some states are up

where the action is, or at the country’s edge

where piers are lit with Ferris wheels

and people still rollerskate in short shorts.

Here, today, the sky is blue–dyed, but

the clerk saw the tornado, saw the world

splinter and lift away, as if all along

it had been made of nothing but toothpicks.

Her car is in the driveway, intact.

Her suitcase, her skull, intact. The country

is open and roads are short. She could

be in Arizona by tomorrow. There,

she could watch the sky stay the sky

day after day after day. But some states,

she knows, dry out your mouth before

breakfast. Some states are a tin drum ringing

over and over. Some states outlaw

certain dogs, some promise constant mist,

some grow ice as if it were a crop.

Across town, she knows, are holes,

wreckage, buried limbs. This

is a terrible place now. She watches

her cat continue the work of clawing

the red couch to shreds. The cat doesn’t

mind that the couch is an ugly thing;

but then, the cat made it that way.