Like The Rain, Smell It Coming - Aricka Foreman

I am dreaming of tornadoes again, too many for the sky to contain. I have checked eight websites and the dictionary on my nightstand. I did not need technology or a writer to tell me there is chaos in my heart. I don’t tell people sometimes my dreams come true. I fear some parts are not metaphor. In the mornings I check the horizon. I am relieved when there is some whisper of light. On the way home from camping, a large storm made the highway a blur of brake lights, my fingers killers to my steering wheel. I kept searching for funnels, their willowy bodies twisting their way to the ground. Mapped out escape routes and viaducts to pull beneath. Today I fell asleep on the couch again. The wind rustled me awake, and parts of the sky were dark again. I can’t shake that something is coming. I don’t do well with worry. My mother built me to fix things.

So I chose this poem because there seem to be two forces at play here. On the surface, the narrator is simply narrating a day in which they are anxiously waiting for tornadoes to come and ravage the land. However, there is a deeper force pulling here as well. Hirshfield says that "Each poem makes a knot, both in what is said and also in the insight it offers into something that cannot in the end be wholly named, only approached." So, while I can't quite put my finger on it, I sense that the narrator is "reflecting" what they see in nature (or rather, what they're waiting to see in nature) as a means of sharing some of the inner turmoil they have going on inside of them, especially sense some of these scenes take place in their dreams.