Atmospheric River, 2023

The governor declares a state of emergency
once the local farm town can no longer be seen
by the naked eye. Other mental health workers and I
negotiate the American's riverbanks, tasked with
ushering the unhoused to higher land. We honor
the directives given us, everything dealt out
must be catalogued: every mylar blanket, bottled
water, or first aid supply. At an encampment,
one man, ontological like the absent aurora, offers
his seven-week-old puppy for a volatile bunk
in the county pop-up shelter near the fairgrounds.
The heirloom is almost ordinary, and our contempt
of a potential breach (the primeval inches rising
per hour) atrophies into hunger nobody will
vindicate. Narrowly avoiding hypothermic needles
buried in infantile prayer, the townsfolk brood
about a future without enough dexterity to soothe
their voyeurism. Earlier, a hardware store owner
doubled the price on sandbags he swore
could stop stormfronts faster than purgatory.
When the universe provides, who are we
to ignore it? is his slogan for the underworld
grasping any voyager in sight. Figurative or not,
we've convinced ourselves the hemorrhage
and Gale force warnings by the end of shift
manifest alchemical pressure, moist as the next
nightmare. If only mourning were the exoneration,
the palpable barrage of energy this allotment
needs to believe itself devourable. For now,
pedestrian palmprints and their euphemisms
suffice where no horizon is worth stomaching.