The “Change” in Climate Change
My cousin WhatsApps me from Costa Rica, fits the family
into the rectangle of video as they wave from the balcony.
He turns the phone, shows me a swirl of birds in the hurting sky.
But they are not birds. They are neighbor Tinoco’s roof tiles
flying in a storm’s rotary energy. My family is calling because
I’m in Oklahoma, which, to them, is synonym for tornado.
Te amo, I say as my cousin lowers the phone for our grandmother
to hear. She’s scared because she’s lived in the town for 80 years
and can’t recognize all these new skies. Because a year before,
a hurricane reaved its way across this country for the first time
in recorded history. Tornado or torbellino or something else,
I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says
that she was calling to ask me the same thing. I don’t know why
I keep forgetting the change in climate change. My grandmother
sighs as the sky darkens to the color of rum. Why I still think
that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.
Notes:
Audio version performed by the author.
Source:
Poetry
(June 2023)
