The Vortex

Back in 1987 I published a prose poem entitled "The Vortex" in my collection The Masked Ball. My previous post about paparazzi reminded me that I'd written on that exact subject all those years ago. Below is the poem, just in time for Poetry Month (and, in case you're tempted to argue that poems in prose don't qualify as "poetry," keep in mind that several years ago Charles Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for a collection of prose poems).


THE VORTEX

In the distance twists the braided whine of a tornado. A dog whimpers in the yard, turning circles, while chickens flutter and jump at the sky. Light flickers in the kitchen as clouds roll and collide like oil slicked on water. A pickup truck scurries to the side of a road backhoed among rows of corn. Pa and Jimmy, both in overalls, run for the ravine of the irrigation ditch. Above, a black fist motions thumb-down to the landscape, snubbing out houses and barns like picnic ants on a checkered tablecloth. Ma and the young ones huddle in the cellar, praying with the pickles and preserves.

At the moment that the sky screams and the thumb stubs the ravine, jumping next to the house, which splinters and moans like a violin crushed under a work boot, Dorothy, thrusting her head out from the pig sty, clicks off a roll that frames the whole event, launching her career in journalism, pulling her, at last, away from this place.


—Greg Boyd