The tornado that skipped our house
left chain saws snarling a block away
to clear the splintered trees.
Power out, phones out, batteries dead,
one of the few days in twenty years
we haven’t talked.
Lately it’s been about my garden,
your band, your gigs, your cats,
dumb movies we see on Netflix,
the job you hate. It’s chit-chat, contact,
windfall
from those years of calls at all hours
at the razor’s edge, those killer storms
that came for you and missed.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 6.
John Palen’s latest book manuscript, Riding With the Diaspora, won the Sheila-Na-Gig poetry chapbook competition and will come out in 2022. He is also the author of Distant Music, from Mayapple Press, and has recent work appearing or forthcoming in Delmarva Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Willawaw Journal and The MacGuffin. He lives, writes and gardens on the Illinois Grand Prairie.
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