Day 1 Convective Outlook for the Royal Mongolian Suma Foosball Festival
Walking dew-toed in the no-longer not-yet mo(u)rning grass
I could feel the humidity
Could feel the tension in the piano strings
Feel the low-level sound system electric hum
The audience chattering in anticipation
Clouds shuddering in anticipation
The tattered sky over the parking lot
Hung heavy rain-woven theatre curtain frames over the school
Scudding warp thread tacked to dew points in the sixties
As the wind shear threw the shuttle back and forth
The program for the evening:
There's a cap in place over 3,000 Joules per kilogram of CAPE
The snare has not yet been engaged
Then all at once it begins
Bass drum and cymbals and hi-hat pelted with hailstones
Signaling the head of the tune
Green suit jacket over red drum skins
Velocity couplet with brushes stirring up the snare
How many genres of debris will fall tonight?
And I’m snapped from the singing
My phone, joining the chorus
My phone, dim red polygon
His shadow scuds past down the aisles
Leaping the steps to the light panel
Rain-wrapped in theatre curtains
As the threat of the twister dances nearer
And nearer certainly it must be
Singing out to the sirens I can hear gathering their breath
It’s an unplanned intermission now
Crowd gathering like radar pixels into clumps in the hallway
Grouping into debris balls as we learn how the tune goes
Learn how to tell the difference between scud and wall cloud
Some of us tone-deaf, secure in the Midwesterner belief that it’ll go around us
And some of us sucked into our screens with the force of an EF2
Because look. It’s written in the score
The drop in correlation coefficient playing a half-step duet
With the south edge of town
As the warning plays its last note
The crescendo and deluge of concert-goers
Splits to a stationary right-mover cell and a left-mover cell
That pours back into the auditorium
To end the impromptu fermataed rest
So I sit with my back to cinderblock
And try to conduct away the fear of
A tenor sax and alto, mother and child
Who’re waiting for the scene to play out
Waiting for the rope to play out
To see if they’re still in key with
The undamaged houses around
Our small cell undergoes a constructive merger
And tutti we applaud the rhythm section’s costume change
Tired of my ears making the harmonies mimic a siren but
How can a meteorologist turn away from the radar scans even at the end of a shift
When the outbreak still roars
And how can a musician put down his horn even with a split lip
When the drums are still rumbling
How can I leave the musicians on the stage
And face the mystery of damage
See the sacrifice, the annotations hastily erased?
They’re pushing their instruments to the outer edges of their sounds
Making them dance so we can feel the music in our storm-heavy bones
And wailing funeral descant-dirge, the
Cross-shaped samba whistle shrieking a prayer to the gods
“Please not my house! not my neighbors not my pets!
But thank holy goddamn fuck I’m here tonight
To miss the brunt of it and
Play my heart out with the adrenaline of narrowly avoiding death.”
izzy806
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