This Is A Test of the Emergency Alert System
by B.J. Hollars
DIRECTIONS:
To the best of your ability, please answer the following questions:
1.) How many times can you say “devastation?”
2.) Please use the following in a sentence: “strewn”, “flipped”, “sifting”, “sobbing”, “spinning.”
3.) Define: Death Toll (Hint: This is NOT the toll one pays for death.)
4.) True or False: You were just a little scared.
5.) These are the dimensions of my bathtub: 58″ x 30″ by 16″. If my wife, dog and I tuck ourselves inside, will we be a perfect fit?
6.) Which of the following is not currently found in my bathtub?
a.) My wife
b.) My dog
c.) Me
d.) Tornado
7.) Which of the following activities are best performed while riding out a tornado in your bathtub?
a.) Secret sharing
b.) Storytelling
c.) Dog petting
d.) Scrubbing out your tub.
8.) Which of the following is the proper response after surviving a tornado in your bath tub?
a.) Calling family
b.) Calling friends
c.) Waiting for a cell phone signal
d.) Continuing to wait for a cell phone signal
e.) Leashing your dog
f.) Thanking God
g.) Introducing yourself to God
h.) Introducing God to your wife and dog
i.) Living up to your part of the bargain
j.) Exiting your house
k.) Wondering why all of your plants are still upright
l.) Drinking a beer
m.) Drinking two beers
n.) Drinking zero beers and remembering your part of the bargain.
o.) Making a joke to lighten the mood
p.) Impersonating the Cowardly Lion: “It’s a twista! It’s a twista!”
q.) Understanding that the tornado did not miss everyone, just us
r.) Knocking it off with the impressions
s.) Pouring out the beer
t.) Going for food
u.) Going home
v.) Lighting candles
w.) Telling your wife what you meant to tell her in the bathtub
x.) Remembering your part of the bargain
y.) All of the above
z.) Some of the above
9.) Which of the following quotations has been fabricated?
a.) “People laid blankets over the bodies of neighbors…”
b.) “First responders didn’t attend to the dead.”
c.) “The earth went to moving.”
d.) None of the above.
10.) Where is the silver lining?
11.) And what do you mean when you say “gone?”
12.) In the space below, please draw a picture of anything but this.
13.) Which of the following tools most efficiently removes fallen trees?
a.) Chainsaw
b.) Axe
c.) Bow saw
d.) Poem
14.) How did your students respond to your attempts to contact them?
a.) With kind assurances of their safety
b.) With concern for your safety
c.) By writing you a poem
d.) By writing you an email
e.) By asking you for her final grade
f.) By thanking you for an “awesome” semester
g.) By wishing you the best of luck
h.) By wishing you no ill will (despite the B-)
i.) By informing you that his car was found two miles from where he’d parked it.
j.) By apologizing for the late paper—”The tornado ate it.”
k.) By asking for extra credit
l.) By asking “pretty please” for extra credit
m.) By asking you for your story
n.) By asking you what she’s supposed to do now
o.) By asking you the definition of death toll
p.) By asking you if he’ll seriously never see you again
q.) By telling you she’ll facebook you someday
r.) By telling you he slept through it
s.) By telling you that composition class taught him little of survival
t.) By telling you that African-American lit class taught him little of survival
u.) By asking, “What is the use of tornadoes?”
v.) By writing, “The nightmares won’t quit coming, will they?”
w.) By writing, “TTYL”
x.) With silence
y.) None of the above
z.) Some of the above
15.) Where does it hurt the most and why?
ESSAY:
In the space provided below, please allow me with the opportunity to talk for awhile. You can understand, I’m sure, the necessity of talking, or of writing, or of overexposing an issue like a dark room left to light. In this essay, please attempt to imagine my great relief in waking up the morning after. Consider my minor inconvenience in having to sleep in the sweat-soaked sheets. Do you believe the world is quieter when there are no lights on? And what are your feelings of a town turned twisted and inside out? How exactly does an exterior become an interior? How exactly does a roof become a floor? True or False: Question 4 is the only one that matters. Please provide specific examples below.
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Distance = Rate x Time
by Erik Wennermark
I am away. I am twenty-two months away from Tuscaloosa, July, 2009. I am eleven-hundred miles away from Tuscaloosa in the lobby of a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Boston Celtics are playing basketball on the television. Men speak of ice hockey and when the doors slide open the air outside is cold and crisp.
The complimentary USA Today on the table has a picture of the wreckage on the front page; several more are tucked inside. Despite the captions, I recognize nothing. It says 15th Street—a street I drove a hundred times—but I see only broken planks and overturned cars. I see no Bowling Alley, no Smokeshop, no Taco Bell. Even my memories have been torn apart.
They do not understand you here. A man on the news last night wore an Auburn polo shirt and an Alabama baseball cap. He spoke of bleeding orange as he passed out bottles of water to those whose crimson blood dripped from eyes, elbows and dusty shins. He is a decent, God-fearing man. The viewers here do not understand. These viewers never will. In a different time the Yankees burned you to the ground. Tuscaloosa, I fear for your future.
I am sitting in a lobby in Portsmouth, New Hampshire writing in longhand about a devastation I have seen on the Internet. A cataclysm received via text message and watched on youtube; the dripping I.V. of a facebook feed. I am writing to remember a place I have often tried to forget, or at least not remember so hard and so much. It is only now that you might be gone—so they say—that I miss you for the first time. Roll Tide.

Erasure
Chris Mink
Here is the Alberta Bridge where he spray painted ROOSTER
in blood letters
Here we were once boys and knew only
what boys’ minds know paper clouds so thin
the moon tore open the sky to draw its crescent in amber
Kids who died in winter car crashes
while another waited for the leaves to green
flowered his father with a shotgun
There was laughing Teeth extracted as keepsakes
We all took punches I suppose
And words thrashed about our feet and so a heavy stomp
as to hammer out an understanding with boot heels
against pine-dead straw
that enshrouded snakeskin,
pocketknives dulled into dirt
Into the Black Warrior we waded barefoot then bare-ass
Some got pregnant on Wild Irish Rose
The rest made out with only limestone scars
lips bitten just at the corner
Girls you see
Black-stripped land of a coalmine
and legs around my neck river water up to my waist
Here we river
Our slow-moving currents carry crawdad claws catfish whiskers
bottle caps with the names rubbed off
Go easy we say
Years have gone
But longer still a word on an overpass
ROOSTER
I remember day still burned in the concrete
even to hands mud-lousy from submersion bottled poison
river-wet with the inner-tube girls
That night we held him tight by his ankles over McFarland the paint
blown back on our faces
18-wheelers roared below us and I closed my eyes
watched the colors corrugate orange and yellow
Here is today’s obituary We Are Old
and we drive to a funeral to escape the sun
Here is where Tuscaloosa has erased a word erased us all
and I tell you what once was

Tuscaloosa
by Katie Jean Shinkle
Magnolia drop, your root system
is showing—green sky, silence, green sky
where are you/how are you/lets meet here
at 8/lets meet here to eat/how can I help?
Magnolia, what is the difference
between Wednesday and Thursday
but green sky silence, green sky
destruction, green sky are you alive.
Where are you/how are you/lets meet
here/how can I help you, Magnolia,
I am worried, Magnolia, I am scared,
drop, drop, drop your root system—
the difference between Thursday and
Wednesday a funnel, an echo.

Tuscaloosa,
by Carrie Chappell
You are not just a swarm of mosquitoes,
Sweat around my neck, a forest of poetic
Kudzu, a whistle-stop. You are not just a tub
Of sweet tea, a gravy biscuit, a one-screen
Theater. Tuscaloosa, you are not just. A wrinkle
‘Round my eye, a city of ghosts, a trip
To the thrift store, a court house. O,
Tuscaloosa, you are not just. I lie
In your Dolly Parton Sunday mornings,
In the hammock of your strip mall, in your
Puddles of bourbon, in your beds of
Catfish. Tuscaloosa, queen city, reverend
Mother. You are not just.
Tus-Kah-Loos-Ah. You are not just. A word.
You are not just. A night-sky-red-clay-
Crimson-tide-BBQ-moon. A yellow hammer,
A hammer and nail. You are not just. You go
Along talkative in the trees, a roaming, pockmarked
Veteran. You stammer to the thump of high heels
On green quadrangular grass. You haunt
Our library. You lounge under a historical marker,
Catching rap lyrics from an air-conditioned car.
You are over the bridge of Northport, sunbathed.
You smell like rootbeer, dying. A line of country knot,
Drying. You wrathful yell. You are an angry god.
You are not unjust. Just a godless country. Just.
Lawns of nativity. A late-night taco, a steeple
On the river, capstoning. You are a stop
On a back road from Birmingham.
Tuscaloosa, you are. The destination. Tuscaloosa,
You are as loyal as motor oil. You are the sling
Of my heart. You are not a tame bird. But
You are a steadfast winged thing. You are
A bench for reading Frank O’Hara. A stoop-less
Vista-less river walk. You are a dreamland
Of landlocked nightmares. You are unjust.
O, Tus-KAH-Loos-AH, you are a secret art
Museum. You, you. You are a smoke stack
In a smoking town. You are a lofty breeze.
A place where we live, lordly as we please.
