On Evacuating to the Albuquerque Balloon Festival During Hurricane Milton
I am telling a story in colors,
a field unending
where even absence is a landscape
of blue sky and air.
In a field once filled with absence
balloons are blooming like lungs
while the heart, first a flame, dies
and then flickers, sends heaviness
alighting to fly away faster.
What then of darkness? Disaster
slows time to a during and after
while sorrow is more of a slow
rise and fall, an arid sky
and its receding shores.
But all of this is neither story
nor metaphor. Elsewhere, there is
a storm I will never fully escape.
A sky is descending beneath the weight
of what we set in motion.
What I can say of this moment
is that I felt neither fire nor fear
just the ground that holds
immeasurable meaning
under a sky that is graveyard
for the untethered, while the field
is where we gave it all away.
