Breaking Story
Karla Linn Merrifield
for Laury Egan
Now in the hour of tempest’s descent
with chaos-shaping clouds, wind, snow, waves
causing closure of schools, closure
of highways and railways and subways,
and the many-jeweled bridges of the boroughs,
but none for the widow across the Hudson River,
atop the highlands, who keenly observes
the rewriting of Sandy Hook, the erasure
of dunes, the deletion of beaches, beach grasses.
It is no wonder she shrinks from storm’s hysteria
as it thrashes its way into epochal history.
In the house of the dead, a blizzard smothers
a diminished spirit and her brittle heart crashes.
