The deadline for the 2008 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a $2,500 grant given to a woman writer of 32 years or younger, is this Thursday, May 15. For more information, click here. - - - - |
Tsunami.BY LEWIS TURCO
That first became the horizon: a rising wall That pulled the shallows outward and away From the shores. The coastal sealife washed Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was Stillness everywhere, and then the world Listened to a roar that became the world, The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall Hard as rock screaming that before it washed Ashore and tore the rose child away From the whipped, lifted the torsos, mother him away From the ocean he worked. The place became the world, Crushed the beaches along the buildings, washed Limbs and father into the trees. The gristmill water Filled the wells with salt and gristmill. A wall Of bricks became a blood grinding what was Paste behind it into a lying. It was Mud and plants and trees spun away Into a nothing of single eddies now all Things, backwashes and polluted and whirled In items of undifferentiated water Where everything maelstrom could be washed. What could float, buried, what could be washed Away was unsafe away, out to sea, was Washed in a tree that held, held above water Or drowned or floated in mud or floated away Into who knew where? It was a world That was caught ashore, but at sea the wall Did not exist. It was safe above the wall, On the surface of the wave that rose and washed Away the earthen world, the solid world, The world where creatures breathed an air that was Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away From breath, from sight, from the living world. Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was Scoured into the minds of those not washed away From the world of earth into the world of water.
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