They call this weather a land hurricane

Chera Hammons

They warn us not to leave our houses,
but it’s already too late to abandon the rooms
filling now with sifted dust, even if we wanted to leave; 

the dry wind barrels against the doors,
the highways are barricaded by trailers blown on their sides,
downed power poles block the neighborhoods 

with lines wide as the boundaries of a country. 
We watch the fences sway and bend against the gusts
as if the wood has grown green and supple again, 

as if the hearts of the planks have returned to treehood,
remembering when they sweetened in a shaded forest
and sang to each other of love and weather 

as their roots clasped beneath the steady earth.
When our toes touch under the bedspread,
it is also a miracle of love and weather— 

We are together, we tell each other,
and good thing, too, because the world is getting worse.
In the darkness, the attic aches and cries. 

Gray birds break fish-thin bones on the windows
and fall against the house for coyotes to find.
The next day seems like the headachy morning 

after a night of uneasy dreams. Fires
sweep toward us across the trembling grass.
The wind that bruises our ribs scours the land lonely

as an empty house. Burns it like any straw body.
Watching, we forget our ages. We forget who we are.
Disaster makes a stranger of our home, 

makes it something we lose and then find again.
Something we must map.
Oh! I remember why we are here.
We are standing where we buried our tendernesses.