Lizzy Burnam 🐞

On a Spring morning when I was 5 years old, 
I sat on the couch with buttered toast 
watching the weatherman talk of high winds 
and gales of up to 60 mph. “Uh-oh, Lizzy,”
my mom said. “You better be careful out there
or you’ll get blown away!” I started walking
to the bus stop and felt the wind pick up 
and die down against my chest, snatching 
my breath away with the force of it. The wind
was bigger than me, I could feel it was bigger
than me, and invisible as a ghost, though
its terrors were as plain as the eye could see: 
garbage cans tumbling down the road,
spitting trash, twigs and branches snapped 
clean off the trees who just stood screaming 
and trembling, roots clinging to the earth. 
At the bus stop, the closest thing I had to my 
mother’s hand was the trunk of a lilac tree. 
I wrapped my arms around it and wept while 
fear churned and gathered force like a tornado. 
Later, I learned about mythical Greek creatures
called harpies—half-woman, half-vulture, 
the personification of storm winds. In early 
accounts, harpies were depicted as beautiful 
women with lithe, graceful wings. Over the years, 
as women’s appetites became increasingly 
demonized, they became uglier, with repulsive 
breath and haggard faces. “The dogs of Zeus,” 
the writers called them, and when a person 
suddenly disappeared, as the saying went, 
they were “carried off by the harpies.” Dante’s
Inferno says that in the seventh circle of hell,
the souls of suicides are imprisoned in trees, 
condemned to eternity as withered, bleeding 
bushes with their own throw-away corpses 
hanging from the branches. The harpies nest 
in those branches, feeding and tormenting 
the suffering souls who committed violence 
against themselves and so must suffer still. 
To this day, I still believe a harpy would’ve burst
out that lilac tree and dragged me by the hair
into earth’s burning core if the bus hadn’t come.