Annette Frost

In the Concession

Originally published in Epiphany Magazine’s The Writer’s Studio at 30

 

The storms were wind and sand and shadows.

They came at night. They came ahead of sleep

and rattled the hibiscus bush. The storms were

red and bleak. And brown and gray and made of breath.

The storms bent the young millet stalks and made them

women, hunched and not alive, not dead. The storms unslept

the sleeping things. Loosed scorpions from the grass

thatched roof, dropped them like rain. The storms

were snakes. And roaches. They surged and brawled.

They made the treetops moan and shake. The storms gave

legs to silent walls. They carried dust and rubbed it

inside mouths. They came, a rushing wall of brittle sand,

but moved so slowly from far away, a red wall coming. They broke

instead of knocked. The storms were men.

Annette Frost is a poet and educator and the director of the Favorite Poem Project at Boston University. Her poems can be found in Epiphany’s The Writers Studio at 30, Nature Inspired Anthologies, Strange Horizons, and other journals. Annette received her MFA from BU. She lives with her family in Acton MA.