by Floyce Alexander

I could say little happens here.
Snow melts, ice forms.
Tornados seldom follow
Though cold descends, heat rises
Whirring toward funnel shape.
I saw one in Wellington, Kansas,
Far off. Sunflowers kneeled
To touch the earth
I walked, a child.
Next door the widow Yehle
Calmed my mother’s fears.
My father heard nothing
In the Boeing plant in Wichita
Those years the war was on.

Weathermen say a tornado
Blew through last summer.
A branch thick as a tree
Fell between houses, ours
And the neighbor’s,
Whose tree it was.
Huddling with our cats
In the basement.
My love saying Hail Marys,
When I heard the crack
I said, There goes the roof.
I’ve lived here so long
I sound like someone
Who never leaves the house.

Nothing like that happens here,
Friends say who’ve never left.
Trees uprooted down the streets.
They try to set us straight:
That was no tornado,
Just wind, nothing touched down.
Snow is forecast for May Day.
A neighbor said he saw it snow
On the Fourth of July:
You could keep going north.
Forget it, Jack,
We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Nor are we in the city
Wishing to be in the country.

by Joseph BruChac

Those four stones I plucked
from the deep bottom
of the hottest pool
of its healing waters
disintegrated in my pocket
soon after I was back in the car,
sifting like salt
through my fingers.

Explain that by saying
they were not really rocks
but concretions of minerals
grinding themselves
down into pebbles
and grains of dust
as they dried.

Or even better, perhaps,
say this —
that they were not
what I was meant to keep.

by Rebecca Newth

On the worst day we received a letter for me
after the immediate death on Okinawa
and the letter said Hi Becky you must be a big girl
by now. And it enclosed a hula skirt

of rope seeming to be made of
grasses, but by now I was thinking fast,

the oldest child of a family of automobile workers
in Lansing, Michigan.

Here we have another note and
some shoes made of more grass
for you, they said, and some mail
from Hawaii or somewhere.

What they hoped was that I would go away
to mull by myself over whitewashed porch rails
outdoors while they talked about the beginning
of you of your body and the end.

by Rebecca Newth

He puts up with so much,
            and here I am not being facetious,
the dirt on his coarse spine
            my attempts to pick off a flea
                        in his intimate place
the Frontline, the Capstar, the wire brush,
                        the bath,
also my going away,
            a ‘selfish vacation’.
He sits at the gate and
            turns his head so as not to watch.
Hey that’s no way to say goodbye!
            Nights alone in the house he hears a door
or thunder, cannon,
the cats’ fight.
I saw once the fear, more than once.
Of all that dogs have to endure,
            tied up, slammed shut,
hungry enough to eat a coil of rubber,
Dear Reader,
            there is no peace,
nothing
until I return.