TORNADO SEASON

Before the raven raging

the sky—

backlit green—

seemed to leak

from the muted April

leaves. Looking back,

how ill fit to see

a Trevi Fountain

blooming

in the darkening

brume, close

the window and return

to our adobe-spiced kitchen,

a stack of Whitman

essays, my blue mug steaming

with the last ginger tea

and remember

to put my tea

on the store list.

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and author of the poetry collection A Lesson in Smallness. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in venues such as Blackbird, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, Five Chapters, Hayden’s Ferry, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review Online and Verse Daily, among others. She is fiction editor for DIAGRAM and an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.