Ceraunophilia

Shirmina: "Artivist" and Doula-in-Training

The sky opens its mouth to curse at me

And i feel at home

The clouds cry a song wet and heavy

And i sing

The air flashes it's teeth

Bright and brief

And i offer stillness

I sit by the window

Captivated by the chaos

Just this night alone,

It calls out to me a thousand times

And I blush at how well an uproar knows my name

Ceraunophilia is the fascination with thunderstorms

I swallowed one once

And have been in love with them ever since

I was born a dew drop

Quiet and undemanding

The ghost of a cry

The chip on the shoulder of a rainstorm

I was born so soft you’d have no idea i came from wreckage

petals so delicate, you’d have no idea a monsoon fed me

But as a black woman

With a family full of black women

Anger and violence blowing thru our limbs

We cover ourselves in tribulations

To teach our skin the touch of a tornado

On the sunniest of days

I YouTube tropical rainstorm sounds to soothe my anxiety

How ironic

To use a storm against another

But i never knew any better

When the eyes of every hurricane look like my mothers

When my dad cracked like lightning

And disappeared like it too

When my aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins

All have tempers like tempests

How can i not love a storm?

It is what both fed and burned my family tree

I am fueled by hot wind and clap-backs

Intoxicated by things shaken and stirred

I don’t understand the comfort of calm

Seems untrustworthy to me

Like it got something to say

Mother nature taught me how to roll a storm off my tongue

So i’m always raining

Always rumbling

Cursed and coarse

I am most myself when i’m angry

I look most like my mother when i’m yelling

And when she died

I inherited her rage

And carried it in my jaw

A bloodline of belligerence

Siphoned thru me like a cyclone

All our mouths are storms at sea

Our tongues

Bolts of lightning that strike the same place on the regular

We don’t mean to be like this

In a perpetual state of pissed the fuck off

Raining on parades

Thundering

But i don’t remember who i am without all this uproar

I tried to cry out all this rainfall

I tried to shout the storm out of my throat

My anxiety shakes the sky so hard

The night falls to my feet

My rage dances in black and steps on all the stars

I am so exhausted of bad weather

I just wanna get to the rainbow