Eric Morris
Short Documentary Film
Cut to a highway overpass like a bomb
shelter. An unsuspecting family of four
driving into Oklahoma en route to Wichita,
Kansas to visit grandma with terminal
dementia. Cut to an airborne Dodge Caravan
in need of an oil change, paint job to cover
the primer, tire rotation, rear end suspension.
Cut to the damage sustained after being dropped
from the heavens, like an asteroid with a VIN.
Cut to the loss of virginity in the arms
of a stranger, on the eve of disaster, on the hood
of the aforementioned Dodge caravan.
Cut to Leonardo DiCaprio and coal sketches
of naked women as the wind kicks at strands
of pubic hair. Cut to a dissected doublewide.
A cowboy missing his horse. A blemished sun
smeared from the sky, like finger paintings
by blind children. Cut to me in my boxers
watching reruns of the catastrophe unfolding
on Cinemax, a bucket of popcorn pressed
between my thighs next to a warm Miller Lite.
Cut to commercial: American Idol, Midol,
Tampax, and Listerine, so when in the casket
the extra’s teeth will sparkle. Cut to a sex scene
as the storm front bares down on the log cabin
and somehow fire still glistens on flesh,
the improbable romance. Cut to a makeup
artist whose specialty is corpses, battle scars,
and werewolves. Cut werewolves from the script.
Cut to neck braces, gurneys, a man scalped
by a satellite dish dislodged from the balcony
of the luxury condos. Cut to a vase of quiet
petunias that show no signs of trauma.
Cut to the family of four now huddled in a public
bathhouse in Texas. Cut to the storm chasers
and the widows in thin veils with tissues.
Cut to rows of children in the tornado position
as if knelt in prayer, waiting for class to be cancelled.
Cut to a child crying in the shell of a bungalow,
a meteorologist in the studio, waiting for news
from the field reporter recently relocated
to the emergency ward at St. Anthony’s hospital.
Cut to commercial: Depends, Clearasil, Nicorette.
Cut to onlookers standing too close and poking
the funnel with a stick like a sleeping wolverine,
like a grenade that failed in its time of need,
but kicking might get a desired result. Cut to a man
in a mobile home. Rather, man in a mobile casket.
Cut to a hillbilly without a clue or sense
of hygiene, acting like he saw something other
than the insides of a prostitute. Cut to the scars
in the heartland. An aerial view, serpentine burial
mounds the indigenous constructed like veins
running away from arteries. Cut to a two
by-four thrown through a retaining wall,
spear-like. Cut to the calm. The aftermath where all
the citizens reveal themselves, act as if just born,
and cry until the golden retriever crawls out
from beneath the wreckage. Cut to the credits:
Tommy Lee Jones as the tornado. Winona Ryder
as distraught widow. Jack Nicholson and Danny Devito
as homeless guys two and three, respectively. Me as
consumer accumulating ample late charges when
the VCR eats a video. Cut to me as casualty surviving
the day-to-day weather, surviving, but aware of tomorrow.
Seasonal Affective Disorder
February, I am flooded with sorrow.
It pains me to know we will not
rendezvous until next year.
Next year I’ve sworn you off, a rash I’ve picked
for the time it takes the sun to orbit
this inclement rock. If only we were better
acquainted and made love for no other
reason than to make love. If only you weren’t
a foreign entity to my body, the splinter
to be removed with pliers, the tick to be burnt
with the sharp end of a fine cigar, a peppermint
lodged tight in my throat. February, I will fill
you with heated helium to make your body
a dirigible and shoot you down as the threat
you are not, but would kill to be. If only my corpse,
though still alive, had climate control settings:
a thermostat to cool me off when you fire me up,
storm windows to keep you outdoors and lonely.
It doesn’t. I carry on. Next year, the lake effect
is preempted by some little disorder that leaves me
vulnerable to your tactless pickup lines, and affinity
for role playing, though this is as unpredictable as you.
My meticulous body incessantly plots against me.
The peppermint melts, undoing itself all together.
Will of the Meteorologist
Under the proper kind of weather,
I want to be remembered as the reporter
who brought you Winter Storm Watch ’94,
the evening edition of Flood Warning,
and warned you, devout public, to cover
your petunias, wrap them in turtlenecks
when a frost kill threatened the summer
of ’87. I’ve defined myself by the cumulus-
nimbus, the calming effect of rain on Chilean
llamas, and the distress a July sky causes
golfers on the back nine. A fog has settled
on my horizon. May the following bequests
be made on the occasion of my passing:
I bestow to my daughter, April, my poncho
from embedded reporting on Hurricane
Andrew. To my first son from my third
marriage, I leave my faithful thermometer.
Its bottom has leaked mercury for years.
My second wife, if she’s still alive,
please, find my other set of keys
for the evacuated, but storm-friendly condo
in the Gulf. To no one in particular, I wish
to impart a weather-beaten hemorrhoid pillow
from seasons of storm tracking behind a desk
cascaded by a jet stream map of lonely Seattle.
For years, I projected baseball to be rained out
on account of tornados, grapefruit-sized hail.
Dual Doppler radar tracked me like El Niño,
the sky now empty as it ever was in tropical
Chicago. Like a typhoon with nowhere to be,
I am the dissipating clouds over empty Idaho.
Constant funnel clouds have plagued since
the first diagnosis. Tomorrow: chance of snow
with little to no discernible accumulation.
How to Assume the Tornado Position
In grammar school, I learned to index: dire, times in; emergency, in case of; survival; inextricably, fucked. I was taught to love the innermost wall, the windowless space, the inhabitants that seek shelter. I pursued the body’s natural reactions when struck with panic. The limpness, the aches of security, the sound of a voice when I can’t discern a body. At the sound of the safe whistle allowing the body relief, I learned to drool on command.
(see also: ponderous--how a body still beating and a body beaten differ only in the placement of the hands).
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Eric Morris teaches writing at The University of Akron and serves as a poetry editor for Barn Owl Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pank, Post Road, The Collagist, Anti-, Devil’s Lake, Weave, Redactions, and others. He lives and writes in Akron, OH where he searches (mostly in vain) for a way to lift the curse of Cleveland sports.