Storm by Jordan Okumura

He was my first archivist, my father.  Tossing editions of dark and light into our piles of ember.  He made our backs broad throwing us headlong into pools to splash in rectangles beneath summer sun, stretching our wings to pin us to walls, release us to flutter under water.  We became swimmers, athletes dreaming of wet feathers and fire.

In dreams he harvests my skin with each rising of anger, not meanness but a soft rage.  It bending inside him like the warped wood he tortured in the tool shed making benches to structure corners into something tangible.  I record his human apparatus in pages and years.  I have his rage, and he writes my existence in his eyes.  Revives my desire for the strings of our family, attching always at the backs of pews and the bindings of bibles.  I have fixed my body into stuttering rage as still and threatening as television static.  It creeps like summer storms, like underground rivers rising out of the hip of a continent.

These fingers we print with each others’ stories.

Jordan Okumura is a recent graduate from the CSUS MA program in Creative Writing.  She has been published in Calaveras Station Literary Journal, Gargoyle #55 and later this year will be included in Jaded Ibis Press’ Dirty Fabulous. She loves writing on her body and being underwater.