Civil Emergency Message (CEM)
it is always raining isn't that enough
I want an old country singer to tell me about home
to tell me about wife
how young when he killed himself
eight times in the bodies of other men
is the desert that large to keep all these souls in orbit
Evacuation Immediate (EVI)
your desert takes its blooming slowly
all serious businesses admit pace
is the key to riches one way or another
but I am always tornado season
in this ruin of a town
that already gold-rushed itself back to bronze
Tropical Storm Watch (TRA)
this season the storm comes tropical
take heart it comes for you
and it has fallen so far west
the car won't hold up to rescue
your tyres are already an antique bomb
spitting up its most glamorous ossuaries
Special Weather Statement (SPS)
ask the weather radio to croon more gently
ask it to learn how an ocean is another large room
in this larger house where I smashed out your windows
put the doorframe ashes in your bathwater
fed you the glass ground up in milk
I thought I was medicine
Shelter in Place Warning (SPW)
I have never been to Detroit
but my own auto industry fails almost always
I never met an airport I didn't like
they are always so ready
I can fathom most seasons except the ones
that will not agree to end
911 Telephone Outage Emergency (TOE)
night road as a library of toy cars
as the smallest things we have salvaged
as the longest debris strung between us
we no longer spin our own electricity
I don't have enough candles
to keep lighting the drive home
Caroline Crew edits ILK journal. Her poems have appeared in Bat City Review, PANK, Cream City Review, and Salt Hill Journal, among others. She wrote the chapbooks 'small colours like wild tongues' (dancing girl press, 2013), 'The Polychrome Clinic' (Midwest Writing Center, forthcoming 2014) and, with Chris Emslie, 'Your Stupid Fortune Gives Me Stupid Hope' (Furniture Press Books, forthcoming 2014). Currently, she lives between Old England and New England.