Category: bonfire (issue no. XIX)

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

Wildfire

Mahaila Smith

People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

—Octavia E. Butler

All of your objects will outlive you.
Here they are:
haunting your line of sight.
So set them aflame.
As in:
The whole world will outlive you
As in:
You are a dying god.
As in:
Welcome to Ragnarök,
welcome to the burning of the world.

A layer of ash coats the sides of trees,
cars, sidewalks, schools, deer,
lungs, arteries.
It is a dry summer.
There have always been fires,
they say,
These are no different.
They start with a spark of static,
a misused chainsaw,
a lighter
a can of gasoline
a metal shovel striking a rock.

We stay inside for days.
The burnt wood floors
and walls and wires
desensitize our noses
to the smell of lilacs.

Mahaila Smith