Known already as a kind of weather, it’s unlikely
a hurricane will share my name.
Wind in both of us, a drumming down.
Some time since I considered throwing a car
through a window or twisting train tracks into a swan.
I like a personal calamity, slow wrecking
over years. Until with a sudden whirling around
I find the path razed from my plowing through.
But I was holding violets, I say
to my face-up palms. Heart-line veers off an edge.
Dear girls who grew up to be mothers,
I do not love enough your children. Dear mothers,
be warned, you will one day leave behind a child
something like me. Children, be hurricanes just once.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 21, Issue 2.
Autumn McClintock lives in Philadelphia and works at the public library. Poems of hers have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Account, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Permafrost, Sonora Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. Her chapbook, After the Creek, was published in 2016. She is a staff reader for Ploughshares.
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