Coffee lid the colour of a pinched lip, a spring so avoidant I’m attracted to it. This rain is wet-
whispering a menacing taunt. Because a tornado took our barn in 1983, I am untethered by
wind. Wind, like me, is too much. Too feminine. Too dramatic. I don’t like the wind, I say, as I
make origami hearts on the living room carpet with a kid who isn’t mine. We bought the rug
thick, so we could sink into it as a family on a Sunday afternoon. In this spring that is still winter,
I order blush that arrives in a small white box, and the more I weigh the more lingerie I buy
hoping to dizzy up with lace a desire the world doesn’t feel. I pick up my phone between lines. I
scroll to feel the weight of me lift. I know he’s beside me but he isn’t really. He’s with his
followers. I can never be as simultaneously far away and close as they are. I am just here, in
parallel play, with our phones out, and our bodies on pause. The kid hands me a flat bronze
heart, the wind throwing elbows outside.

“April Tornado Watch” is the runner-up in Minola Review’s inaugural Poetry Contest, as judged by Doyali Islam.

Zoe Whittall's third novel, The Best Kind of People, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is being adapted for film by director Sarah Polley, and was named Indigo's #1 Book of 2016. Whittall won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award for best comedy writing with the team from “The Baroness Von Sketch Show”, and has written on Schitt's Creek and other shows. Her second novel Holding Still for as Long as Possible won a LAMBDA literary award, and her first novel Bottle Rocket Hearts is now being adapted into a limited series for TV. Her short fiction and arts criticism has appeared in Granta, The Walrus, The Believer, Cosmonauts, Hazlitt and others. She has also published three volumes of poetry. Her next novel, The Spectacular, is forthcoming with HarperCollins.

Image by Sheri Hooley @sherihoo