Tag: fire

Two Poems by P M F Johnson

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Fire

The comfortable enemy that warms us,
lulls us, kills the cat, smudges
the walls to the devil’s own darkness,
renders air unbreathable.

What you said that night
I believed. Hopes built
from straw and paste.

Up and down the canyon, the stench
of everything lost. How the couple
next door never got out.
A fishhook of doubt.

*

Known And Unknown

I want there to be answers, don’t you?
Little enigmas snuffle through the room
like eager piglets after acorns.
People argue on Friday nights, laugh
in disbelief at each other’s theories,
bang down their mugs. Uncertainty
makes us fear, fear makes us certain.

Sloughing off resentments, sticky mud
on the bottom of my shoes. Making a toy
of my feelings to change them.

A red-tailed hawk drifts out of view
behind oaks. An uneasy beauty,
this puzzle with no borders.
The woods familiar, but nothing
whispered prayers can map.
We don’t know what happens after,
who we are without each other.

I will not transplant my grievances
into larger pots, better lighting.
No amount of watering can
prevent such loss. They say gratitude,
but I’m not so good a farmer as that.

Where the mist gathers, ghost deer browse,
unaffected by their own non-existence,
nor by this new shadow that has joined them.
A few harrowed weeds tossed on the furrows,
their stems like question marks
on the wine-dark soil.

*

P M F Johnson has placed poetry with ONE ART, The Evansville Review, The Main Street Rag, Measure, Nimrod International Journal, The North American Review, Poetry East, The Threepenny Review, and others. He has won The Brady Senryu Award, been awarded Finalist in The Atlanta Review Poetry Contest, and been shortlisted for a Touchstone Award. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, the writer Sandra Rector.

Can Someone Rewrite the Script with a Happy Hollywood Ending? by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

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Can Someone Rewrite the Script with a Happy Hollywood Ending?

           ~ a pantoum

Santa Ana spits his fiery tongue, lashing the night air
with inferno, scorching each patch of earth it touches.
Sirens sing their terror song, birdsong drowns
in the distance of yesterday morning. We woke

to an inferno, see it scorch each home it touches.
We check the maps, pack our go bags, drive into
the distance. Just yesterday morning, we woke up
happy. We felt safe and ready for the new year.

No need for a map. With bags packed, we keep driving,
following a red trail of taillights through orange smoke,
hoping we’ll be safe. Not ready for this, not this time of year.
Nothing quite like this has happened before.

We follow a red trail of taillights through orange smoke
as little fires erupt beside and around us. Lord knows,
we’ve been through nothing quite this bad before.
Be brave, a father says, together we’ll get through this!

his little ones erupting in tears beside him, not knowing
when Santa Ana’s fury will stop lashing the night air.
We try to stay brave. Together, we will get through this.
Sirens will end their terror song. The birds will sing again.

*

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poetry has appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, ONE ART, Quartet, About Place Journal, Timberline Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Snapdragon, Amsterdam Quarterly, and many others. Author of What She Was Wearing (2019), her manuscript, Pockets, was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest (2024) and is forthcoming from MoonPath Press in late 2025. Shawn is two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her children and granddaughter live in California. Shawn shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.

Summer Arithmetic by Molly Fisk

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Summer Arithmetic

What else can I tell you?
It’s September now and the fire
started by a burning car
that grew to 50 acres six miles
from my door was contained
overnight. There have only been
two days of real smoke —
it’s confusing facing another lucky
blue morning. Fire season once began
in autumn, not June, not May.
We are waiting for the coming
destruction. We are practicing regret,
and terror, our bodies adrenalized
even in sleep. Now the news is
smoke will kill us in a few years,
First Responders earliest, no
dispensation for the work
of salvation. Meanwhile, laundry
dries on the line, tomatoes ripen.

*

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Fisk, who lives in the Sierra foothills, has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Quiet Cup by Jennifer Abod

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Quiet Cup
Day after the LA Fire started (January 2025)

This morning, the wide plastic, ugly gray lid on the industrial garbage can in the alley outside my kitchen window is blocking my quiet morning view: high polled wires in an open sky, lush green trees in the distance. The apartment owner next door put a lock on the lid after the fire a few weeks ago that woke Winnie, the dog, who woke my stepdaughter in her upstairs apartment at four AM. By the time she alerted me, she had called the fire department. I watched them in the dark as they tried to stop the flames rising to our roof. I couldn’t help imagining the person who did it, someone who can’t take care of himself, who yells at himself on street corners, leaves empty 7-Eleven cups in our parkway grass, deciding to just do something. I drink coffee looking at the burnt pile of vine branches and lifeless leaves on our charred wood fence, march determinedly to the back-alley, slam shut the lid, return to the house hoping the person who lit the fire finds something else to do.

*

Jennifer Abod is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, radio broadcaster and jazz singer. She is a former assistant professor of Communications and Women’s Studies. Her poems appear in One Art Journal, The Metro Washington Weekly, Silver Birch Press, Sinister Wisdom, Wild Crone Wisdom, Artemis Journal, Fruitslice, Discretionary Love, Persimmon Tree and are forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, James Crew’s Love Anthology, Vita and the Woolf. www.jenniferabod.com

Two Poems by Mary Lou Buschi

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Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.

STEP 1: SAND, CLAY, FIRE by Allison Wall

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STEP 1: SAND, CLAY, FIRE

I used to think faith
was built on heavy things
that could not be moved

but everything can be moved

lay your palm
on this sun-warmed boulder
feel the atoms shifting

one day it will be sand

I clung to The Cornerstone
it fell through
my fingers

I dug out the pieces
hard, sweaty work
each pebble a weight
these clay hands
measured, bore,
and cast away
into primordial fire

*

Allison Wall is a queer, neurodivergent writer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University, and she has published short speculative fiction, personal essays, and book and film reviews. Her poetry is forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine. Connect with Allison on her website, allison-wall.com.

Three Poems by Rachel Custer

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Farmer

Save your sorry. Your sorry won’t get me
my crops in before the frost. Your sorry
won’t fill the propane tank. Confess me up
a big old sack of free feed, while you’re at it.
What I don’t need? A man who can’t outpace
his sorries, who leads ‘em around like a pack
of fair-weather friends. Another man hog-tied
by shoulda done. I knew a man once, he plowed
through each day like sorries leaded his boots,
each foot dragging the bodies of his regrets.
His whole life was an apology. God, what
did he think? It would stop him dying? He died,
like we all do: with dry lips and not enough
to drink. Sorry is death for no reason. Sorry
is men dying everywhere except the spot
where you stand, and you laying yourself
down in the sand. Each death deserves a life.
It’s like, I don’t know. Here! It’s like a field.
The most fertile field needs a fallow year.
The man who never rests his field grows
nothing but the knowledge of should
have done. What should I have done?
My son was just learning how to run the big
plow, and if he was too young, if another year
would have kept him from its blades – what
should I have done? What will it help
to plant, again and again, that field where
my boy died, and to harvest regret from
the black soil of the past? Don’t tell me
you’re sorry, I used to tell him when he
messed up, it doesn’t fix it. Don’t tell me
you’re sorry. Just stop doing the wrong thing.

*

Fire

Halfway down a country road a house leans
as if asking for forgiveness. As if asking
to be remembered well. Remembers the time
the roof caved in after a wet snow and how
the candles made stories of the walls. Nobody
knows hunger like a cold child. Hunger eats
anything it can get, and if hunger gets nothing,
it will eat the house that holds it and make
a dessert of itself. Hunger would rather reign
than serve. I would rather ask forgiveness
than permission says a woman, and this woman
knows the truth: how once invited inside,
hunger never leaves. Hunkers in the corner
and glares. How it feeds and feeds. A house
leans like a fire waiting to happen. Says a child:
I would rather steal than ask for anything
just before asking a neighbor to borrow
an egg. A man walks to work as if asking
forgiveness, leaning like a house against
the wind. A house could be forgiven for taking
hunger’s side, for demanding so much,
for its quiet and constant need. A man
could be forgiven for striking a match.

*

Inheritance

Lucky from the start, I was. Came home
lips to nipple and swaddled in a good name.
Nothing softer in this world than a good name,
nothing warmer. Like the best cologne dabbed
behind each ear. Like the deep weave of plush
rugs, the feet of soft women dancing. Before
I was poor I was rich. Before I was rich I was
nothing. I was maybe the extra finger of Scotch
in my father’s night, was maybe the crystal
just-so of my mother’s glass. I was low light.
Before I was drunk I was a child, tucked inside
others’ drunkenness and waltzed around airy rooms.
The whitewashed tombs of my mother’s breasts.
Her Home & Garden womb. Her best-dressed,
drunk at the Christmas party smile. Her royal
flush spread of hair, brushed and gleaming. I
was the kind of lush that blooms in scant light.
She was the kind of hush that looms. I can’t fight
the sure dread that my mother will look down
on me someday, that she will bend over me
like reed grass. The light behind her. Someday
you’ll thank us, I imagine her saying, everything
we gave you. The kind of name that could never
belong to the kind of man I am. The cold comfort
of no blame. A world willing to shift to fit my name.

*

Rachel Custer is an NEA Fellow (2019) and the author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, The American Journal of Poetry, The Antigonish Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (OJAL), among others.

BUDDHIST FIRE-EATER by Susan Michele Coronel

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BUDDHIST FIRE-EATER

Each time she strikes a match, she tilts her head
back, imagines she is entering a Coke bottle’s

glass neck, swallowing the last threads of sulfur
before its saw-toothed cap snaps on.

After she seals her lips around the head
of torch, she exhales with ease

to release the flames of attachment
she has been holding her entire life.

A siren of gratitude widens its range.
What is empty cannot be destroyed.

*

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. She has a B.A. in English from Indiana University-Bloomington and M.S.Ed. in Applied Linguistics from the City University of New York. Her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in publications including The Night Heron Barks, Prometheus Dreaming, Amethyst Review, Hoxie Gorge Review, TAB Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Passengers Journal.

Fire and Flood by Kristin Garth

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Fire and Flood
(as two Barbie Dreamhouses)

Some have a Barbie dreamhouse as a child.
First I bought, myself, my 20’s, with cash
compiled in strip clubs, a girl going wild
in plaid. Until a stranger lit a match
to burn down everything I had accrued
with lewd choreography. Second an
abuser bought for me, an overdue
idyllic acrylic home that’s briefly
my own, reparations I will choose
to accept. Plastic families are easy
to protect, it would seem. This one I lose
by flood, recluse who lets nobody
in, no men, though this strategy is flawed.
Even plastic is not safe from acts of God.

*

Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Best of the Net and Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker. She is the author of 20 books of poetry including Flutter Southern Gothic Fever Dream, The Meadow and Candy Cigarette Womanchild Noir. Read her poetry journal Pink Plastic House a tiny journal where she is the Dollhouse Architect. Listen to her weekly sonnet podcast called Kristin Whispers Sonnets on Anchor, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Visit her site Kristingarth.com and talk to her on Twitter @lolaandjolie