By Rebecca Brock

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. 
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” 

— Pierre Tielhard De Chardin 

Two vees of wild geese merge as the sun shrieks 
color the way sunsets out west burn 
when the land burns. It must be the hurricane, 
states away yet. Here, in Virginia, I am waiting 
again, at the high school, for my son 
who won’t talk the whole ride home. 
Is this what they mean? What doesn’t kill you— 
and something about the pressure 
it takes to form a diamond: your land burns, 
your home floods, but just look at that sky! 
I text three friends:  Go outside. See the sky. 
My therapist says my need to connect  
can feel like aggression. I can’t help  
but think that the threat of mutually assured 
destruction keeping us safe seems less solid  
these days, less tightly wound. 
In the car, waiting, I feel like an eye 
of a great storm—or the source 
of unseen damage. I cannot say, son, 
talk to me, please. So I wait  
too long in the car, in case he’s out early, 
I wait and listen to the marching band 
practice, watch the sky work its palate, 
and if anyone walked up to the car window 
and asked me who I am or where, 
I might say, I am the child’s mother. 
When I see his slouch 
and angle, the sky expands 
and contracts like the rib cage 
when breaths are deep enough. 

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Rebecca Brock’s work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Radar Poetry, The Shore, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. Her awards include the Lascaux Poetry Prize, the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award, the Atlantis Award, and the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize, among others. Her books include The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023) and a chapbook, Each Bearing Out (Kelsay Books 2022). A MacDowell Fellow and a graduate of the Bennington Writing seminars, she has been a flight attendant for most of her adult life and is still surprised by this fact. Find more at http://www.rebeccabrock.org.