Caylin Capra-Thomas

Last week you sent a picture: flooded sedans

under a bridge, tornado near us in Oak Park. 

I was in St. Louis, at the airport where every bathroom

is a tornado shelter, and every year here

the sky drops down to punish something — the land,

to eat its richness and bring whatever dares to rise

down a notch, every notch, to level whatever  

climbs so we can begin again — again.  

I didn’t say any of that, just then, or ever — who

talks like this? — and when I say we can begin 

again, I don’t know who we are, or why we always

must, but I remembered your first tornado because

it was also mine. You were a baby, I was ten.

Breezy Acres, the waterslides by the reservoir 

with charcoal grills and signs that said  

No horseplay. I was afraid of horses anyway

but I loved the curly fries at the snack bar

and I was walking back with some

when everything clouded over and the wind picked

up. I looked for dad where he’d been

reading John Grisham by the water,  

his knees up in that low, faded beach chair

but he was running, and your mom too, 

and you were in your car seat, the wind

nearly lifting you out. Calm as anything 

but frowning. Spooky. And then I saw it. 

God’s grey mouth funneling down,  

hungry. I ran, hunched over my food

and dropping rain-slicked plastic Heinz 

packets as I went. We laughed about this

once the thing had passed. My instinct —

save the fries. You don’t remember this. 

You were just a little thing, little storms

gathering at your brow. One day, new 

gods would tear through you, grim, lope

across your surface, one called worry, 

another wine. You would know them

as only a true believer could: in body 

and in blood. You weren’t aware of this then,

and neither was the twister, but I remember 

now, looking at your photo of the flood,

shivering next to you in my wet suit 

while I struggled with the corrugated edge  

of a ketchup packet, how something dawned 

over your dark silence when at last

the little vessel gave up

all its gloss, 

its guts.

Armoire

Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word wardrobe? 

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, with two lines borrowed from that work to open. 

A lock is a psychological threshold. A lock  

is an invitation to thieves. I never had one 

for my wardrobe, built solid by Enrico,  

my Piacentino forefather, and where I hid 

big jugs of Carlo Rossi under sundresses and 

long scarves. It meant more to my mother 

than to me. She remembers him — Enrico. 

Remembers him rising early to deliver bread, 

quiet on the drive, quiet as he nodded off 

while nursing a snifter of nocino. My mother 

stores that remembering in the wardrobe, 

gliding a hand over its streaked blonde 

wood and murmuring, She no lucky, that girl — 

something Enrico used to say to her. Luck  

has something to do with how you look  

at it. A psychological thresher, reaping  

what you forget you’ve sewn. Like, once,  

in Burlington and underage, I found a full bottle

of blackberry brandy on the downtown 

bus, drank half sitting semi-circled 

with some boys who hadn’t hurt me 

yet. What luck, I thought, and then I brought  

the bottle home and hid it in my hamper 

way down into the white wicker, below  

heaps of tube tops and dirty low-rise denim  

I’d forbidden anyone else to wash.  

Over the course of that summer, I forgot  

about the brandy. (It wasn’t in the wardrobe, 

which, actually, my mother called an armoire,  

knowing how dresses can be fashioned  

into weapons.) And when at last I exhumed  

the bottle from its sordid secret spot, I found it,  

and my laundry, my hands and my forearms, all 

thronged with hammered ants. That, too, is luck,  

and I spent the afternoon sober as an executioner. 

What was I to do? This was their destiny, as it was mine  

to destroy them, as it was my mother’s to marry  

three thunders with silence bottled in their centers, 

as it was Enrico’s to leave Piacenza for Boston 

just to marry a girl from Parma and make pizza and be 

a mystery to his son, his granddaughter, to me. 

Some thirty miles east of his birthplace, near Cremona,

a man with his same first and family names was born

and lived and died in one house, which he never

stopped refurbishing. He never married but for

the balconies and balustrades, carved columns,

a colossal dome. I’d like to see it someday,

even though both men were perfect strangers to me.

Such arduous adornment. The armoire

Enrico built — the unlocked but unopened

chest of every man I’ve never known.