ILL WIND

  by Cappy Love Hanson


Spring gale out of the southwest again, more ill than usual:  
banshee whipped up over the Pacific, raking Baja, Gulf 
of California, Sonora--a long fetch battering the borderlands.  
Gusts strike the ground, thunder toward us as if the earth 
were heaving up in waves.  It’s the kind of scream that keeps me 
hiding indoors as it rips up dirt, hurls it like a furious child 
against my mobile home’s aluminum flanks, shoves mesquite 
and creosote and eighteen-wheelers around like a great bully.

If it had a face, this blast would be my father, drunk 
on Bud and bourbon, screaming at us kids to shut 
the fuck up.  Or my dry-drunk ex-lover, livid, swearing, 
barely pulling a nose-breaking punch that sends 
a malevolent breeze across my cheeks, just to let me know 
“what I could do if you really ticked me off.”

As wind bursts under my unskirted trailer, vibrates 
frame and floor, I hunker into an overstuffed chair, 
meditate a pit house roofed in steel where this shriek 
would flounder.  Sunk into the protective mother 
who doesn’t slam her bedroom door so as not to hear 
but forms a constant bulwark against the lashing racket--
I would lie down, curl around the sweet blue pearl of safety.

A terrier gust shakes my refuge like a rat.  A glass twitches 
off the kitchen counter; my mantra shatters like glass.  
This time, I heave myself out of the chair, throw open the door, 
let the gale slam it against the siding, and this time, finally, 
for the first time, I scream back at it:  Stop!  Enough!


Note:  Fetch is the distance the wind has blown in one direction.