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BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at raymond@barrietoday.com. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following poem by Amy Hsieh is dedicated to those who were affected by the tornado that hit Barrie one year ago on July 15, 2021. *************************

On July 15, 2021, a tornado struck Barrie, Ontario.

It rained a relentless confession in a grey-soaked world as the taxi I rode home in tried to dodge hail. My eyes grew heavy, and my head swam like the view.

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on distance. Words float above like stars. I won’t let myself touch — I can’t. Running out of fingers to count with every day, I need them all. Today, neighbours watched the sky lose its mind: wind scream in the face of the street, flip a trailer like a finger, trample fences with flowers yearned for all year, smear a hand print across the sides of houses, swipe the siding off like slander with a sneer, strip the planks of the near future we’d taken as a deck leisurely leading to the lake, spare a mirror to watch itself rend open a brick wall like a shower curtain to expose the curvature of porcelain, leave standing half a naked toilet (a single white rose) and strew another into a yard, reach into bedrooms, whip up a flurry of bright sleeves, a hundred tongues, turn photographs into debris, yank back to nature, the wood from houses, forming giant crude, jagged nests on driveways and lawns,

drop shock down like an anchor through the roof

and rip it away—

clear off the entire second floor like a chessboard in a fury. The staircase with no railing now invites you up to nothing.

And there I was, stumbling under my green umbrella out of the taxi, through my door and up the stairs desperate for rest, oblivious to my near-miss, too tired to notice a tornado.

Getting woken up a few times, I peeked, then turned back from the blinds: eight police cars, two ambulances and buses, one news van. Something must have happened.

Woke to the wobbly aftermath, the wreckage cleared of rain, walked out of the dark house to calm air to see how disaster tears down barriers.

We move carefully through a yellow-taped intersection like a secret we agree to. Order is upheld by police officers, paramedics, and warm pizza. The school parking lot is bright with headlights from help. Families with suitcases make their way to a place to stay. People poke among the glowing coals of the sunset sky and witness glass in a window frame like clothes half-torn hanging off a shoulder. We move attentively out of the way or towards one another and offer bottled water, condolences, stories, names.

It’s a reminder as I walk home how sometimes the stars align for almosts that could change my life.