poEtry encore
Michigan SuMMerS are MeaSured By The Tornado Machine You can make her dance again. Turn the knob, she’ll rise from nothing into her old spin, her pirouette en pointe. Turn it back, she’ll sink into air. Harmless. These days she dances to your tune. But she recalls a day she made you hop. Remembers lurching into town from the west, slinging her hips, zagging down the main drag, a roaring tarantella, straightening her shoulders, unholy flamenco over the cemetery, drilling the dead from their sleep, jack-hammering their stones. May’s maniac, snapping grandfather oaks, upending grandmother maples, kicking in the cars, sucking out the windows, slicing buildings like cake. God’s hip-hopper cut a new groove that afternoon. Five souls it took to bate that hunger, send her on her way. Spun out somewhere east of town, she dwindled. They caught her near Galesburg, locked her in this crystal chamber so the children could learn to explain her, to know her comings and goings. And when they turn the knob she gathers herself and spirals upside down, silvery, doing her silent hula, letting them think they can. — Gail Griffin Griffin taught literature, writing and women’s studies for 35 years at Kalamazoo College and lived here when a tornado hit downtown Kalamazoo on May 13, 1980. She will officially retire in August after a transitional sabbatical. She has published memoir, creative nonfiction and poetry, winning the Lois Cranston Poetry Prize in 2006.
Encore invites area poets to share their work with Southwest Michigan readers. For consideration, submit your poetry and a short personal profile by e-mail to editor@encorekalamazoo.com or by mail addressed to Poetry Editor, Encore Magazine, 350 S. Burdick St, Suite 214, Kalamazoo, MI, 49007.
40 | EncorE summer 2013
the length of helium balloon strings escaping from used car dealerships the number of black sweet cherry stands on old 131 as vacationers head north the intensity on the Scoville scale of road kill skunk on a humid night seconds between thunder and the power outage, days before returning to the grid pilgrimages to the big lake with feet big as flippers and spare tires, built-in flotation devices, measured by dog’s barks per minute times lots times time divided by patience by sirens on the weekend, the fire trucks and meat wagons, same thing at the small town parades with vintage tractors, the mayor, gentle horses and a clown the kids try to ignore as they measure the ’fro of cotton candy spun around a horn and the distance from ball’s release to the duck it never knocks over, how many extra turns if the girls smile at the carnie, measured in 4H ribbons of many colors, bags of just shorn sheep’s wool, jars of quince jam, and smiles. It’s the length of two mittens tossed on a puddle. It’s measured almost completely by heart. — Elizabeth Kerlikowske Kerlikowske is an English professor at Kellogg Community College, in Battle Creek, and president of the Kalamazoo group Friends of Poetry. She measured last summer by the harvest from her own garden and a friend’s farm share.