Madi’s Birthday

The last time I stayed in a cabin
there was no cabin.

There was though: a trailer
wrapped in fake Lincoln
Logs and set on cinder blocks, a hundred yards
of parking lot behind an amusement park.

And even though the 97 degrees had me
sleeping instead of standing in line. Sleeping
instead of hearing the tornado sirens
crying out slow across the flattened counties,
my family did hear them. They hurried back to take me
to the painted concrete walls of the wash house.

So we could follow the lightning and laugh
at the people streaming from the shuttle to their RV.

Screaming like it was ride.

And after we had smelled enough fresh water
from the thick-slatted whiteplastic chairs
that we carried way out past where the tide had come in
to the sand bar we climbed up to discuss the limits of photography,

and how the stars worked
that we spied through gaps
in sporadically blushing cloud cover,

after we were tired with collaging
our sandy footprints on the polished-sticker wooden floors,

me and my sister, Madison Rose, lay at a tiny window

in the trailer’s attic, just below the hammering metal
roof, and discussed the flirting techniques
of the 100 year old men she served food
at her first job, while we watched
the tallest rollercoaster in the world
get struck by lightning and go dark.

The wail of a fire engine just a tiny thing to the west.