Barometer
What Moved the Judges
“The poem’s honest suffering surprised me. The variety of symbols leading to an unavoidable conflict with self and nature, then resolution, built on various natural poetics in an inventive and beautiful way.”
Thunder remembers what the sky tried to say, breaks itself
open just to speak. Each echo runs through the ribs of the world
like the low hum of breath after grief. Rain tastes like iron
when it falls through memory. We tilt our faces upward and
call it a blessing that tastes of blood. Every drop a confession,
every storm a kind of forgiveness. We are never prepared.
Wind slips through looking for names that it has forgotten, touches
each blade, each ghost of movement, hoping the horizon will answer
before it tilts, listening, balance only a matter of attention before
trees translate wind into rumor. Leaves moving with stories of
distance, root, secrets. Light bends to touch what it cannot save.
We learn tenderness from it, fear, the ache of reaching toward
the things that are already burning. Seasons forget what language
means bloom, petals turning back to stem, frost clinging to everything
that refuses to stop living. We call it weather, the body learning
to change its mind. Somewhere the sky is remembering its own body.
In the moments after, we let the air write something soft, refreshing
on our skin. The rain speaking in tongues we almost understand. Each
silence remakes us. Each storm, too. In that memory, we are named again.
Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and teaches in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from the University of Texas – El Paso and also holds a doctorate in educational leadership. Some of her favorite recent publications are in Sussurus, Bi Women Quarterly, and narrated on the Midwest Weird podcast. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. @fadingbetty.bsky.social