I was born in an otherwise normal middle of june at the tail end of tornado alley. I’m a gemini, scorpio moon, half air, half water, all storm and
tremendous force. say what you want about astrology, scorpios, or geminis, I’ll tell you what I know. I learned as a young child why they name storms after people.
perhaps some seal or some levee broke in an unseen place upon my birth, because death would dog my every step
and I swear on my father’s grave that hell
followed after that.
nine months after I was born, I got sick twice,
one week apart. the first virus took out my
immune system, the second took out my heart.
but I was a fighter. they hooked me up to a
machine that would breathe for me. one dose
of the meds they gave me would knock
my full grown, linebacker sized father out for
ten hours because I refused to go quietly,
like a category five hurricane slamming into
a coastline during the worst season on record.
I ripped through death and pain so goddamned
hard that death had a near me experience.
then came a sepsis scare. then a stroke. then
near starvation. each time I wailed a hurricane,
hundred fifty seven mile an hour straight line winds.
death learned to hate to see me coming.
all before I was three.
I learned to watch the storms that mirrored my
soul, learned to love the wind and the water,
find peace in the howling and the sickly blue green sky. in 2000, two tornadoes tore through
my city, devouring chunks of the skyline. there
are still signs and monuments there if you know
where to look.
nobody thought I’d live to see eighteen, twenty one, twenty three. they bet against me, calling me
crazy, plotting against me, betraying me when I needed them most. I learned to become inevitable, to channel my force into words, into song, into low pressure systems of my own.
so their plans didn’t hold.
their levees didn’t hold. they cracked under their
own weight and were washed away in the storm
surge when the people didn’t evacuate in time.
when I was twenty five, a boyfriend called me
what I was, a barely contained hurricane.
I lived with a lover when I first moved to
milwaukee who worked on emergency alert
machines. I learned the names of my surroundings when storms
rolled in with the same passion in which I
learned about her, the same way I studied the
storms when I was younger.
and I wonder if someday
someone will name a hurricane after me.
-Allēna 9/22/2025
