Category: bonfire (issue no. XIX)

Dragon Breath

Tricia Knoll

Scritch of metal tines on concrete called
our gang from the fort in the woods.
We abandoned paint-can seats,
acorn cups and mushroom-rotted logs.

Fathers in padded jackets and duckbill hats
raked oak leaves in low October sun.
Scritch of rake – we brought twigs for treats
as fathers whooshed up fire with a little gas

and much damp smoke and shifted us
from one side to the other as the wind eddied.
No one thought of air pollution, climate change
or carbon sequestration. This was ritual,

pretend cook fires on the oxbow of the Platte,
banks of dry waving grasses, tribes circled.
Smoke trending to pale. From the smackling
of a burn pile, this taut smell was fall,

going toward Halloween and shorter days.
Liquid fire tongues leapt. If the men
talked politics, we didn’t listen
as they broomed strays toward the bonfire.

If this was a playdate, we didn’t know it.
If the future would yield up yard debris bins,
we were too deep in rites of fire to imagine it.
When the heaps were ash, we ran

back to our fort, sugared up
on ashy marshmallows,
a wild smell of char in our hair
replacing summer’s mowed lawns.

We’d seen the dragon,
heard it cackle and expected fall
would always be the same.
Fathers. Rakes. And fire.

Tricia Knoll

The Fjord

Jennifer Skogen

It was a good memory: visiting Norway,
staying on a farm with my husband’s family,
eating waffles with cream and jam
cooked over a fire on the banks
of a fjord, like I’d stepped
into my own bloodstream and followed it
back in time to where my father’s family lived
years ago, one hundred years at least,
maybe more,
before I appeared on the long chain
of miracles that blood can perform:
love chasing us children down the years,
demanding we exist
despite distance
and time. Despite the great sea
that separated my mother’s ancestors
and my father’s.

It isn’t that I belonged to the cold
Nordic air that carried
sparks from the fire and held the perfect
scent of waffles overflowing the iron,
turning golden and decadent.
My last name couldn’t buy me passage
back to another life
any more than I could stop time
from sweeping me into another decade
past that memory on the beach,
with the grief and joy that rode
in the implacable current beside me.
All this to say
that I ate the waffle
they cooked for me,
jam dripping down my hands.
All this to say that we can live
through miracles.

Jennifer Skogen

Best Friends

Faith Allington

We met on Bonfire Night
before the seasons turned
too likely to ignite.

The stars were affixed
to the velvet dusk
while flames blossomed
on our cheeks.

Bright sparks of laughter,
the arc of your smile,
and dark rich scent of apples
rising from the cup.

We offered the fire
our twigs of hawthorn.
I thought we were gold,
even knowing Robert Frost’s
admonition—
nothing gold can last.

But in that night we remain
etched in firelight,
flickering selves that never
break or rust.

Faith Allington

Immigration

Robert Okaji

The hill’s shoulders, slumped under the sky’s glare.
Hardscrabble and brown grass, insects chirring.
Voices in the still leaves.
I ask the boy if he would like water,
some bread. Fruit. No, he says, I must go.
The sun flares on the barn’s metal roof. A history
of stray thoughts, of complicity and calloused hands.
One tired cloud lingers overhead.
I sharpen my knives, think of cold beer.
Of finding home where no one knows me.
Where snow falls and wood burns cool.
And other incessant dreams.

Robert Okaji

Showy Yellow Flowers

Maggie Frank-Hsu

Often hard or poor soil
is a fragile, complex mix.
a single season of flood
makes for wild
hurried blooming,
the rare chance
to be too much
before drying to stiff
bayonet-like leaves
that catch fire and burn easily;
a bell of sacred smoke
seen from a straight-back chair
beside the bay window
where nobody ever sat.
I have asked for so little, just
a drop in the dry season
to take hold on the soil surface.

Maggie Frank-Hsu