a change in weather

My father pulls off I-38
three hundred miles east of Omaha.
I grew up on this fringe of tornado alley.

When I was younger I would imagine
the winds that colonized
these yellow fields were radio waves
sent by extraterrestrials. Aliens,
I was in the land of their prophecies.

As flatness elongated the torque
of the Earth, my father would tell
me stories from his world.
He handed me a photo from the 1980s.
He was biking through a market in Changsha.

These memories that are not mine
linger with the half life of uranium.
The sun is lucid in that image,
like it has been replaced,
different from the one in Iowa
as it reflects the humid sky on
my fathers face that is odd
and disturbed by a different radiation.
He is the ancient moon, craterless,
before eons of meteors.

*

Michael Liu is a writer from Naperville, Illinois. He is a junior at Naperville Central High School. His works have been recognized by Foyle Young Poets and Scholastic Art & Writing Awards along with having been published in the Daphne Review, Bow Seat, Polyphony, among other journals.