Katie Bellnier Thomas is a recent graduate of Berea College. She has been perusing creative arts her entire life and thanks Berea for providing the ever-inspirational landscape and people to help her on her way. She now lives in Knoxville with her husband and works with literacy acquisition in multi-lingual children.
Grief-Step
I watch the storm come
rolling over the verdant horizon; it makes the world pale, an old time photograph
set to motion in a mad parade wave at the oncoming water.
Thunder booms over the hill where I can’t see
and alerts my neck skin.
White lighting flashes
and I ask the storm to change this world for me.My hands still smell of the bleach
I used in my dead brother’s molding room.
As I tossed the bags of clothing to one side of the emptying space,
I felt his body parts were in them.
He is here like I am, waiting to be thundered at by God,
cleansed by the rain.My mother steps out onto our leaning porch.
All we can do is sit under its tin roof, the violence of hail-sound calming us;
in our mourning, we link our arms and dance.
The storm arrives; flashes produce instant dreams behind my eyelids
of a dark haired boy
of a yellow house
of our gene pool on the shattered windshield
of my white dress—Now my mother and I wave our arms
in a liberated grief-step to the percussion of the rain, the melody of it all.
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