Daniel said once that the clouds in Kansas look like giant gray brains.
Their thoughts all big and drifty and slow like ruminant sky gods.
Brains that hover over wheat fields and ineffable highways stoned
on the grandeur of their high seat until they die a raindeath or blow away.
Tonight though the sky looks hungry. Not brains but intestines.
A stomach twisting and digesting whole football fields of nimbostratus and dark Latin.
Birds scatter from wires leaving utility polls behind to hum and spark in the lesser acids.
We hear via radio of a possible tornado along I-25.
A black esophageal funnel that may or may not swallow.
The dogs come out with me onto the deck and bark death threats at the sky.
Low rumbles of famished drought-stricken thunder.
Water sits bubbling on the stovetop, forgotten, next to a package of dry spaghetti.
Only the wine makes it outside. A blood-red South American scud cloud
in a heavy glass tumbler. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, they say.
And though I am no sailor, the wine pulls me further and further into the clouds.
Michael Young lives in Fort Collins, CO. He studies microbiology by day and edits Rust + Moth by night. He has been published in Aries: A Journal of Creative Expression.
