Against the Rail of Our Fire
Against the Rail of Our Fire
Lindsey Priest
He loads the thick cloud with moisture;
the clouds scatter His lightning,
they turn round and round by
His guidance
i. Trailer Trash Psalmist
She is too small to see where the last shock
of lightning struck. So she leans, no, she half
falls from the porch, which sags more than it
stands beside the door of their mobile home.
Her mother swears she’ll bring down the whole
damn thing, playing around like that. She’s not wrong.
Neither of them are. A rotting porch leveled
by a cement block, shook by this small girl.
When a tornado’s promised, the last place
any child, even she, is told
to be is outside, but she is alone.
Her dad’s dead or drunk somewhere. Her mom works
first and third shift. She’s outside, shivering
with excitement, seizing each vein
of lightning with her eyes, trying to see
what the clouds hide, laughing
with the thunder, inhaling the iron
thick air of God’s mercy.
The doorknob speaks in her mother’s common
sense voice: Stay inside. When you hear
the sirens, wrap yourself in a blanket, go
fetal, let the bowl of our yellowing
tub comfort you, but when you feel the tornado’s foot
fall, get out, hold to the only thing holding you
to this Earth, the plumbing, the sh— pipes,
if you want to live.
A toilet, her given savior.
ii. Project Prophet
Older, she’s found her way to some city, leaning
from a fifth floor balcony, a barred scab
on the surface of a building she fully expects
will collapse under the continual squall
of fights and forgivenesses muscling through
each front door in a hall of endless front
doors, drywall danced or stomped on to her head,
music or curses vibrating the worn
carpet beneath her feet – all the uncleaned
crumbs and dust, shaking up and up and up.
The storm begins. Everyone forgets
we were just about to kill each other,
huddles underground. Let the last air
she breathes be the mildew perfumed washing
machine fifteen hard working families share?
No. No, she’s outside again, high,
pressing against the rail of their fire
escape, watching the clouds grow dark and crawl
in, wet and swollen as slugs leaving their iridescent
smear over everything we thought
the world should be.
Should she hide from the only wonder
poor children can afford to see, small
apocalypses leveling our bests’ efforts?
Miss that for what? Her life?
She’s smart enough to ask, but not wise
enough to know what only the old could tell:
you're always too young to be ready to die.
The currency of wisdom is time, and she's short
on everything but imagining the million
ways her mother’s warned she’ll die.
She’d rather give herself to the storm, face it,
she thinks, like any spanking. She wants
to hear no one yelling but the sky,
who has cause.
Lindsey Priest
Poet & Mother
Lindsey Priest is a wife and mother. She studied Writing and Biblical Literature at a small university nearly a decade ago. She writes in the early morning while the rest of the house is asleep. She spends her free time reading with her young sons or gardening with her husband. This will be her first publication.
Photography by Cesar Coni