Terri Linn Davis & Aubri Kaufman

How To Be a Fallout Shelter

Obsess over the disaster with me. Fill your pockets 

with rocks 

and sink 

into every open closet and cupboard, searching 

for an alternate universe. When it all fails 

to change, press your knees tight to your chest, become harder.

Consider the lessons you learned watching 

Saturday-morning cartoons:

How the real monsters are simply people

unmasked. How far your feet will keep moving

past the cliff's edge. How pain is its own

kind of funny. 

Struggle, now, to separate yourself from the hiding

and the rocks you keep. 

Dwell in the difference between metamorphic and metaphoric. 

Learn that something metamorphic just means it’s survived

time, heat, and the weight of it all.

That is a metaphor.

This isn’t: I did not emerge onto the earth’s surface—cooled 

and hardened, I began as something other than rock.

I was once the tender inside of something true.