Summer Storm It was my first experience with death. Just a tot standing with family on the back porch, watching pigs take refuge under the big pecan tree during a thunderstorm. I still see flashes of light ripping through the darkening skies. I still anticipate the next clap of thunder rattling aluminum dipper in cedar bucket suspended over the water well at the steps. I still imagine God in His heaven hurling thunderbolts with perfect precision onto the whole world. Suddenly a boom—sows and piglets fall to the ground like they have been silenced by a sniper’s bullet. A family scrambles for the screened door leading to perceived safety. Death came that August afternoon, not as a creeper or stalker, but as a brazen, in-your-face, got-cha Death that shook the house from its foundation. I remember holding fast to my daddy’s leg, watching my mother press her fingers to her temple as if that gesture would save us from the same fate as the animals lying a few hundred feet away, as motionless as the pyramid of skulls in Cezanne’s still-life. The next scene is family along a yellow chromed, formica-topped dinette table, I on my daddy’s knee, eating lemon ice cream, his favourite. On that day, it was my favourite, too. Jo Taylor Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. Her favourite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it, her major themes focused on family, place, and faith. She says she writes to give testimony to the past and to her heritage. She has been published in several print and on-line journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, and in 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire.
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September 2023
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