And he’s convinced himself he can convince you.
“Hey, baby, I’m the spark to ignite you.”
You know now what you didn’t know then.
Once you saw a stump in the Petrified Forest
on vacation with your family.
When your father smacked your mother
for forgetting the map,
you learned to wander in and out of the trees,
cloud cover darkening every turn.
Later, cupping water over and over into your palm
in a National Park restroom,
you listened to your mother weep behind a stall door.
You read the signs: Only you can prevent forest fires.
Only you. So, you loved men who combusted,
spontaneously gave yourself to the flammable,
stripped yourself bare
for their ovens, splayed yourself for their driptorches.
And burnt out, you can now tell that bastard
you’re running outside to cover yourself with leaves,
his wood smoke skin can ash.
You’ve learned to love this new germination,
this prairie restoration. You’ve learned to love
the new taste of moss,
damp dirt against your teeth.
Christine Butterworth-McDermott’s latest poetry collection is Evelyn As: Poems (Fomite, 2019). Her poetry has been published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prime Number Magazine, and River Styx, among others. She is the founder and co-editor of Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, an online venue for speculative fiction and poetry. This poem is part of her forthcoming collection, Spellbook of Fruit and Flowers (Fomite, 2023).
Photo by Pixabay