elizabeth cranford garcia / poem

Facts on Lightning, or Poem to be Abandoned When I Dream of Other Men

1. Lightning can split a tree, her trunk halved and pale, opened up like thighs. 

2. Once a man was struck seven times running through a field. It followed him, tearing at his clothes.

3. I’m twenty-two again, in a field. Our friends have all disappeared. In the dark, he’s standing so close.

4. A current that moves over the skin’s surface is called a flashover.

5. Lightning can strike up to ten miles from a storm.

6. I’m at a party, he’s holding a knife. I take it from his hand.

7. The energy of one lightning strike is more than 10 million volts.

8. I lay down with him, the knife between us.

9. It can burn hotter than the sun’s surface, so hot your own sweat scalds you.

10. I’ve climbed a tree. His breath is hot in my ear, his limbs wrapped around me.

11. A current that bursts through a body will leave a fractaled scar, a brown branch grafted to the skin.

12. Lightning strikes twenty thousand people per year.

13. A bolt starts with a charge from the ground, a volunteer.

14. When I was fifteen, our family drove through the desert at night, watched light crack through the sky’s black bowl. 

15. If I raise my hand, like the cactus, what fires will start?

16. In a storm, a car is the safest place.

17. It’s not the rubber of the tires that keeps you safe, but the Farady cage around you.

18. I’m the moon in cold space, pulled towards the sun. Burning up. Splitting in two.

19. What will it mean if none of these is you?

20. Once I watched a man inside one. The bright fractals trembled all across the metal’s outer shell, inches from his hands, and never struck.

21. Conditions are only as hazardous as the damp ground you stand on.

22. In the night, I wake sweating, turn on the fan until the flash is over.

23. On an online map, you can watch live lightning strikes. Little pulsing jags on a screen. Storms far out on the ocean.

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Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s debut collection, Resurrected Body, received Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Image, RHINO, Chautauqua, Rappahannock Review, Portland Review, CALYX, and Mom Egg Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an MFA student at Georgia State and mother of three. Read more at elizabethcranfordgarcia.com.