Climate
by Meghann Plunkett

It felt familiar, your mouth moving
     up my side like gale warning. My
        arm calico-mammatus clouds--
Blood brought to the surface.
Now I understand my childhood 
home. Releasing shingle after shingle
   into brutal air. Our front door
torn and flat in the yard. Violent 
gusts whipping through the marshes--
   the back of your hand.
       of what I have unlearned 
this was the hardest.
One sandpiper singing 
still, desire does not have to leave you ruined.

Ms. Plunkett is the winner of the Missouri Reviews Jeffery
E. Smith Editors' Prize and Third Coast Poetry prize.
She works as a television writer on various Trip the Lights
and Shondaland production.