The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
—Tracy K. Smith, “Duende”
April’s a tirade of lightning storms. Even the dirt ends up hurting. Everything wants to fight or make love. So when the amaryllis came from the mail order catalog, it came in darkness, wrapped in plastic’s tourniquet. I wanted its bloom to wake me, save me, so I set it outside, not expecting the sky to break. When the power grid crashed, all I yearned for was light. I snaked cords through the dining room window, the mechanical yawp of a borrowed generator hammering my patio’s brick. There were runs on water, runs on gas. When the blackout fried the surface water plant, I caught droplets in pots, used my propane grill to boil bacteria. Thieves placed skimmers where I swiped credit cards. I mistook ice-cracked branches slapping ground for gun shots. Linemen worked through the night. When the lights flashed on, I was a ghost returned to my body. So when the amaryllis came, not yet flaring its blood-red petals, I knew how to wait for a soul to come home. I watched the bulb breach, unleash its furious music.
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Sara Henning is the author of View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), and Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2023). She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University.