No Talk of Fire

May 6, 2024

Can we be bitter without setting our futures aflame? I shampoo my hair in the garden.
Someone tells me to send a letter to everyone I had ever talked bad about.
They return marked with black ink. I trace the outline of my veins with scissors.
Who would I be if I was not me? A mirage? A reflection? A ghost? This is for my future children.
I’m sorry that I could not bring you into this world. I love you and I wish I had killed you.
I’m sick, I tell the doctor. There’s rot in my lungs.
He responds, Have you considered it’s maybe just anxiety? Nowhere bleeds into everywhere.
I cannot remember what California tastes like. They all want to know how I’m gonna die.
Gunshot, stab wound. Disease snowflaking out into the slippery air. I’m gonna be famous, baby!
What’s it like to be a star? Hollywood wishes it could have my body and so do most men.
Satisfaction paints the night wish-dolly white. He places a hand on my stomach.
I tell him, I can’t have children. He tells me I am more than my wanting to die.
One door shuts. Another flowers open. Oak, Maple, Daffodil, Daisy. Baby’s first tears.
The two headed calf before the morning. The wood before it separates from the stream.
The light shining off the coast, warning of the shallow depths beneath the surface.
A god, a failsafe, a forgetting, a future. Smoke rising over rocky mountains, drifting towards tomorrow.
If there’s a flame, I don’t see it.