Fire Country
        Beginning with a line from Tarfia Faizullah's "West Texas Nocturne"

Because the sky burned, I had to unhinge
my sooty eyes from their lingering.

In the season of undoing, the tender heart-leaves
of the new are shredded

as soon as they arrive. Wind eats the view
and scalds a wrecked swath like a medieval dragon

as it moves across this land I've made
a home of. This is the land of the living,

despite what is buried here and the sand
with its urge toward erasure.

Everything is germinating,
and the horizon flares

with fires, distant and close, smoke
the color of sunglasses. I see

but my vision is skewed. Listen. I don't want
to sound such yearning but the wind howls too

and means nothing by it. The hills are on fire
and the desert is on fire and the air is thick

with other people's fires. And my own burning
is so small as to go unnoticed.

I am calling but the wind is busy
taking everything away.

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Copyright © 2019 Rebecca Aronson All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission