Tom Darin Liskey

Stormbringers 

Those rough tongued river folk

South of the Missouri

Would confound me

With their open vowels

And sloppy consonants—

Pronouncing the word “hail” like “hell.”

I still blame them 

For my childhood fear of summer storms

When clouds blotted out the horizon,

And daylight turned black.

I would run and hide in the cellar

As storms rolled into the valley—

The farm reporter on the radio announcing:  

“Hell” was falling to earth.

But instead of brimstone, 

Destruction came  

In cold, hard clumps of ice—

Sometimes the size of my hand.

Hail that pinged off the rooftop 

Breaking windows and banging up cars. 

When I was a child 

I believed summer was the devil’s season.

Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. His fiction and non fiction have appeared in the Crime Factory, and Driftwood Press. His photographs have been published in Hobo Camp Review, Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, Synesthesia Literary Journal and Midwestern Gothic.