This evening, I draw the hurricane inside out.
Hard water thickens my scalp, and
1971 plays a trick on the rain
Is it 1970 or 1971? One sounds a lot
more innocent.
I had run my hair under it, outside,
Scraping the sides of my bumper, hours earlier.
To look out the window is to
Sense tail-riding.
I have empathy for weakening storms
Storms that stalk the worst to mark their
allegiances
To play into a hurricane is not letting it
Wind, no, to play into a hurricane is
To overflow thy cup and declare no winners,
No survivors
Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn and the Development Manager at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. Their work appears in Social Text Online, No, Dear Magazine, The Poetry Project, diaCRITICS, and MONO NO AWARE. Their first chapbook is Ad Học, published with Wendy's Subway (2023).
