“Windshield wipers

on a sign from a sinking van

helped him stay alive.” 

A man, trapped in his car during Hurricane Harvey, turned on his windshield wipers to alert anyone that someone was, in fact, there. That act meant the difference between getting out alive and drowning in his vehicle. 

His story is among those that Eloisa Perez-Lozano, an Iowa State alum and League City, Texas, resident, tells in her poems about Hurricane Harvey, which were published in the Houston Chronicle on September 2. While her family did not deal with any severe flooding, two of her parents vehicles got water and she was concerned about her friends in other areas. 

Perez-Lozano is also a member of the creative writing community in Houston, and during the hurricane, she came across a writing prompt from Tintero Projects, a writing and reading organization for Latinx poets and writers. From this prompt, her inspiration came. 

“After staying in the house with nothing else to do…I had felt this kind of mental energy building up and once I had the prompt, the poems just materialized one word after another,” Perez-Lozano said. “For two nights straight, I took my phone to bed with me and since the haiku poem form is so short, I was able to count out the syllables on my fingers and then text the poems to myself as he [my son] was falling asleep.

After collaboration with the Houston Chronicle’s book editor, three of the poems she had written ended up in the paper.

The series in the Chronicle is titled “After Harvey: Poems from the flood”, and compiles different forms of poetry written by people all around the Houston area about different aspects of the storm, from personal experiences to mere observations. While Perez-Lozano had three haikus published in the Chronicle’s piece, she wrote 34 haikus in total, as well as a long form poem. Perez-Lozano says she has notes for a few more poems, but they haven’t been written as of yet.

A Japanese form of poetry, haikus are three-line poems, with the first and third lines having five syllables and the second line having seven syllables. The short but impactful nature of the haiku made it Perez-Lozano’s preferred form of poetry to write. 

“it really worked out quite well that the poems were shorter considering that time is usually in short supply when you have a small baby to take care of,” Perez-Lozano said. “Also, it really forces you to think and only use the words that will have the most meaning since you have a limited amount of syllables at your disposal.” 

Perez-Lozano also said that an archive of poems from the storm is in the process of being built, all with poems from poets all through the area. 

Perez-Lozano also provided a list of additional relief resources and information, which can also be found here.