A Catalogue of Hurricanes
Jay Aja
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
Irma, 2017
Memes of Floridians stockpiling
booze and potato chips for impending
hurricane parties clatter into your cell
before the WiFi shuts off. A text from your friend
that they're evacuating under order
of the National Guard from Town 'n' Country,
that the area will experience flooding up to six feet
and the only way people leave afterwards is in body bags.
In Carrollwood, you'll watch the electricity knock out,
the skinny bourgeois trees on the street of your HOA
bent sideways under gale-force winds, your whole life
you've lived here, measuring a force that could make you bow.
Michael, 2018
You take a picture of a Toy Story sky
from the doorway of Barnes & Noble
and post it to Facebook with the caption,
Watch out, there's a hurricane outside
and you head into the cafe area with the moms
and their coffees and their kids being tutored
by the elderly white women with the kind faces.
They could have been your middle school teachers,
your elementary school teachers, with their rich husbands
and the desire to give back to America's children, all Southern hospitality
and indifference towards a brown body moving
in the background of their lives, the glare of composed smiles.
Dorian, 2019
At work, you discuss the nomenclature of hurricanes,
suppose it is a good thing that they are not named
for people of color, given the symbolism of eventual collision,
not another name on a list of wreckages left for reporters to circle.
Well, there was Michael, says your friend. She's pregnant,
caressing her belly and pushing her brown and gold
Senegalese twists over her shoulder. And, his two-year-old
is named Dorian, waving at the Black man at the desk behind you.
She drops her hand to the picture taped to her monitor
of her boyfriend and daughter, all Black joy and family nucleus
and she tells me she is afraid to bring her son into this world,
that she is unsure if hers will be another Black son slated for a list.
Sally, 2020
When you track a hurricane you must account
for a series of variables: moisture levels, sea surface
temperature, wind zones. The NOAA employs a variety
of technologies to render the projections of large curved
arrows displayed by local news stations on every
Floridian's TV. Everyone is very aware of the dangers.
But there will still be denial, still be this cacophony
of outrage about having facts served, buffet style.
Still, this unrelenting. A call for God the next best
solution, the stockpiling of water and toilet paper
and food, a reality for a world that now lives like Florida,
looks to it for guidance, for actions in response to natural disasters.
Ida, 2021
It's been thundering all day, but no rain,
just lightning in the eerie pink of the gray clouds
surfing high over the heads of the houses next to your Dad's
when you, all pent-up and kinetic, step out into that twilight to walk.
Around the block you circle, a dark shadow
on the pavement under the yellow, London-fog streetlights
when your cell rings, a friend calling to see what's up
and concerned to hear you're walking at night, It's not safe!
I'm...not Black though? you're suddenly feeling guilty,
aware of her 3C curls, the "model minority" privilege you have, but,
You're really dark though, that's all those rich white people will see.
You look up at the shuttered houses as she says, we're all Black to them.
Ian, 2022
Your Dad gives you a directive
when your neighbors throw a hurricane party,
when you come inside angry that their guests
have parked their cars in front of your driveway.
Meh nah whan geh prahblem widdem neighbor dis,
he admonishes, as if it makes sense, for you to not
walk up to the white neighbor's door, tell them
politely to please move their fucking cars already.
But, you understand where your Dad's coming from,
the same fear that compelled your friend with her unborn son—
she grew up in St. Thomas and had seen hurricanes her whole life,
knew they were forces you moved around and could not control.
