Today’s New Verse News: HURRICANE IAN: GIFTS IN THE MISERY OF AFTERMATH
by Claire Matturro
Ashley Garner had given up on ever seeing her wedding ring again. She lost it outside her Fort Myers home just days before Hurricane Ian crashed into the coast of southwest Florida last Wednesday… The family stayed at their home during the storm and went outside to clean up as soon as it had passed. “We’re about 10 minutes into cleaning, and my husband is cleaning up the brush and the trees right next to the garage door,” Garner said. “There’s a pile of brush and trees, and he moves over one pile, and the ring was right there.” —AP, October 8, 2022
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Garbage swirls around broken people and lost, bewildered pets while cadaver dogs prowl mounds of wood and concrete bent to waste by hurling winds and storm surge. Newly homeless people crowded into shelters, feeling the roughness of unfamiliar pallets hard against their skin, are warned that they must leave though they have nowhere to go. Across the globe, Russians continue killing Ukrainians, but here in Florida our focus narrows— How do we find our missing mother? Where can we get fresh water? Find food which tastes fresh on our sore tongues? Shower off this itch and stink? Is it safe to flush a toilet? Inland, farmers search for lost horses in swamped pastures and count dead cows flung into ditches by river currents broken free of levees in two feet of rain. Someone’s pink umbrella floats by in flood waters spun off a Gulf beach once seemingly benign and filled with summer kids splashing in waves not yet turned violent. In all this cursed misery of aftermath still strange gifts are bestowed—the neighbor who never spoke to us arriving with chainsaw to clear the cracked tree sloping over our porch; hummingbirds unharmed returning to feed; the perfect stranger who hands clean water, tangerines, and $50 to an elderly man crying inside his car that won’t start. Then this, a woman finds her lost wedding ring she feared was as gone as the Gulf coast island homes. She places the ring, retrieved from a pile of brush and tree limbs, on her finger soiled by the grime of recovery. She rests, sitting on the curb, and prays to God, giving thanks for what she sees as a sign of hope.
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Claire Matturro is a former lawyer and college teacher, and author of eight novels, including four published by HarperCollins. Her poetry has been published in Kissing Dynamite, The New Verse News, One Art, Muddy River Poetry Review, Topical Poetry, Tiger Moth Review, Lascaux Review, and is forthcoming in Slant.