Thursday Poetry Post: tornadoland

how could she have found me after all this time?

Hi! Today we are taking a look at one of MY poems. Whoa! In April of 2020, I wrote a poem called “tornadoland” as part of my National Poetry Writing Month project. Last year, it was published in the anthology Hell Is Real, which you can download for free or buy in print.

Here’s the first draft of the poem, untouched since the spring of 2020:

And here’s the “final” version, as it appeared in the anthology:

I remember, when I first wrote this poem, sitting in bed in Queens and trying to manifest myself into a memory. You may be surprised to learn I was not remembering my Missouri basement as I wrote this, but my Arizona apartment on a specific day in 2016. It was late summer and there was this wild dust storm forecasted, only it never came.

Instead, the sky stayed bright and sunny and clear, but the wind became violent, whipping at the windows and shaking the building. I went around my second-floor apartment and opened all the windows, even the balcony door, because I was scared they would blow open and shatter. My pale yellow curtains ballooned and billowed as I stood there in a trance of sorts. And on that day in 2016, I was thinking about my basement, remembering tornadoes.

That’s the image I was focused on as I wrote this poem, and I think it shows in the revision. The third stanza is where you actually see it. “I had waited with the windows/open to stave off the breaking,” and it worked. If you compare the first version of the poem to the finalized version, you’ll see a lot of changes in that stanza.

In my rewrite, it became more compact (lost those lead-in lines that were just a few words long) and the violence escalated. I took out the sort of introspective implications (“parts of me I thought I’d gotten rid of”) and replaced them with overwhelming reality. Clouds, coast, gravity! In my opinion, this makes the reflective mood of the final stanza more powerful. I grapple with identity, place, and belonging throughout the poem, but I leave the explicit questions to the very end. The “how and why?” only happens in the aftermath of the storm.

One thing I’m particularly proud of (and which was there from the beginning) is the repetition in this poem. In five separate places, I repeat words after a line break. My intention was to create an increasingly frenetic pace, and to “spiral” the language around the poem. Y’know, like a funnel. The inevitably of the tornado grows with that repetition; two of these instances are centered around the image of a freight train to try and imbue the imagery with even more raw force.

While I was workshopping this poem, the main feedback I received was to increase the sense of a building storm. Hence the big crescendo in the second-to-last stanza. And in the last stanza, we do what everybody in the midwest does all spring: we go back to the basement! Originally, my final stanza was a direct reference to that moment in Arizona I was occupying as I wrote this. I said, “I have stood in that moment ever since.”

But in the final draft, we change locations as we shift tenses. “I have been sitting in that basement” accomplishes a few things. Juxtaposed with the “knee-deep” wind, it creates a layer of overwhelm. If I’m sitting in something knee-deep to my dad, I’m in over my head! And it also (I hope) conveys a sense of patience and maybe even resignation. You do not fight a tornado, you do not escape a tornado. Or an identity. Or a history. You simply wait it out.

I’m gonna be talking about my own poems every Thursday in April, so if there’s one you want to know more about, just ask! Thanks for reading.