Roger Pfingston
		Tornado While her husband naps, dreaming again the mile-high fir toppling out of the clouds, she's in the garden deadheading phlox and feverfew, distressed by fresh mounds of dirt. The afternoon has darkened so, even the birds have gone silent. If she turned on the radio or TV she'd know a storm the size of a Texas night is bearing down and all the silence in the world is not enough to keep it from happening. As the wind walks her back to the house it's steel traps she's thinking... the random tunneling of moles. Winter 2002, Indiana Where is the icy tit, that dripping grayness that I suckle through the season? How can I be my brooding, lyric self when February sends regrets instead of zero air contracting like a steel band around the house? How can I walk from room to room reciting lines when the sun ignites the closed blinds like a reprimand? And yet, those same blinds open are equally distracting, revealing a green confusion of crocus leaves piercing the mole-tilled ground. How can I take to my favorite chair with hot tea or chocolate and feel pleasantly cloistered while the taunting buzz of a sluggish fly sends me not in search of pen and paper but a rolled up copy of Time? Where is she who calls herself Muse that I might tinker with some newness free of sunny, high-temp days a rational man would welcome? Where is my fever, my heart's cabin!