Georgann Prochaska
Down the Water Slide
Maggie and Tommy stomp and splash
in knee-deep water
while Jimmy’s dad starts up the generator,
and children down the street
laugh at a motor boat
putt-putting in the flooded road.
Molly sings, “No school!”
as her dad sheers through feet of snow,
hacking and slashing with a shovel
to open the front door.
Pammy’s nose wrinkles at the news
“A cyclone bomb? What’s that?”
Georgie and his mother hit the ditch
face down.
Tornado winds roar in their ears
as their trailer twists into sculpture,
again.
“Why can’t we go to the beach?”
“Dead fish,” Danny’s grandmother says,
“Thousands of pounds of dead fish.”
Bridget fears her dad and hides.
His fist punches a hole in the wall.
Another year of crops rot in the field.
While two fields away Benny
stops speaking, eyes glazed. Lightning strikes fall
like spears, kill this year’s cattle.
Too hot for Chrissy to play outside.
Candy misses butterflies.
Charlie swats killer mosquitos.
And Chad stuffs an emergency backpack,
ready for sweeping mudslides or fire.
Pulsing whop-whop of chopper rescue
brings Jackie new terrors.
Will Goldie be left behind?
Ana rides on her father’s back
listening to the tramping feet of
a steady stream of hundreds
with nowhere to go.
Homes washed away.
And a polar cub
feels the warmth of his mother’s body
Disappear.
Because icebergs weep.
Georgann Prochaska is the author of Murder Comes to Grindstone (Outskirts Press, 2019), the fifth installment in her Snoopypuss Mystery series. Her poetry has appeared in Gravel. Prochaska grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, studied literature at Illinois State University, and had a long career teaching high school.
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