Tornado Damage — By Morgan O. H. McCune

From the air it seems nothing more

than brushstrokes, casual and thoughtless,

a grand-scale scribbled earthwork,

a monster sketch some great artist

left abandoned at a café —

tiny refrigerator, doorless;

door of a house, houseless; tangles

of the unrecognizable commonplace —

 

not God pointing the way out

of the Garden. But what of this have we

not done to each other, and more? —

a scientist’s dark paper

airplane, thrown by a brute;

children collected in cages;

a world warming to smother us all.

~ Morgan O. H. McCune

Morgan O.H. McCune currently works at Pittsburg State University in southeast Kansas. She is a native Kansan and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis (1991) and an M.L.S. from Emporia State University (2002). Her poems have been published previously in River Styx.

Monthly Editor Maril Crabtree’s poems have been published in I-70 Review, Coal City Review, Main Street Rag, and others. Her book Fireflies in the Gathering Dark (Aldrich Press, 2017) is a Kansas Notable Book and Thorpe Menn Award finalist.

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