Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Moving Midwest to Teach
A tornado is an education.
It points things out,
wipes things out.
It speaks without hearing.
It is respected
in the circles in which it moves.
It divides form from content
and takes away lives.
Those who survive it
do so in graves. Who do not
are buried in the gravy
air, lying even
high in the imagination and giving
up meat. Love
is an education.
I am coming to take you
by storm. I warn you. You will go down.
Heather McHugh teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and as a Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her most recent book is The Father of the Predicament (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), and she and her husband, Nikolai Popov, translated a book of 101 poems of Paul Celan entitled Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). (updated 2023)
McHugh’s Eyeshot was reviewed in AGNI Online by Kevin McFadden.