She remembers watching the Rancocas rise
that year Belle slammed ashore
tearing siding and roof tiles from beach houses.
She recalls how the Mullica churned, a brown
foaming roil, sandy banks too weak to staunch
its uncharacteristic force.
How current unleashed itself from sluggish
shallow creekbeds. How the deadfall dams
re-routed its familiar flow.
The pine barrens sucked down eight
inches of rain in three hours and jetties
moved, the pilings cracked.
Mushrooms materialized on wooden stoops
and stair treads, roads dissolved,
the lights went out.
She and her mother sat at the table,
her mom’s face flickering in candle flame,
her dad standing at the bay window.
Loud. That’s how she remembers that
storm. And her father, young then, she recalls
his anxious observation of the creek—
calculating the crest, reckoning
the cost of abandonment vs. the risks
of stubbornness, attendant to the rain.
Ann E. Michael lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, where for many years she ran the writing center at DeSales University. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has been appearing online and in print for many decades in numerous journals, anthologies, chapbooks, and two previous collections. She maintains a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog