Scrap Burn

-
Scrap Burn


When what was once wild, leafy, 

unashamedly ungeometric, has been 

bored out and planed down to fit neatly 

on a hardware rack; when 

sap has been so unceremoniously sucked

by steel, empty pores pressure-treated

with a poison so green it won’t even let death

cross the street, lingering live edges

spray-painted purple and cursed 

to the discount hell of what won’t 

sell; even after such big-box 

bastardization, such gear-gilled gutting

of what once lifted the light in irreplicable

fractals of leaf-shimmer and shadow,  

the fire is undeterred, embering all 

the same. That's real heat, a real flame.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Groceries

-
GROCERIES A hot one for sure, the key into bliss of air conditioning a sharp pang in his pocket, but for all that  he stays sweating on the stoop,  veins thick as green beans as he leans and contorts his body, heroic under the strain of his refusal to admit that for all our late-afternoon grit, our penchant for one-trip wonders, what's worth troubling the table nearly always begs more than a bit of doubling back.
Read more

Real

-
Real The best yield the garden bore was before  we soiled the spot with seed, before Henbit and Bittercress became weed because we didn't plant them there, and the fence was neatly stacked  in lumber racks at the hardware store  with a pressure-treated chance at perfectly plumb.  Our significant others, too, kept their figures  firm as the flesh of a fresh cuke twenty years into our marriages  before we met them, their priorities in prim  rows well-tilled and running parallel to our own.  The summers were never dog-tick   hot, spouses always were, and our houses rarely  required repair, till we—our very real  bodies with their very real hungers tiptoeing for the ripe glint of it all at the top  of the trellis—found the beans were soft in spots and less than ideal, but still, once swimming in a thick confession of butter, infinitely more filling.
Read more

The Line of Thinking

-
THE LINE OF THINKING The line of thinking runs  that given time enough—the funds— we might yet get in front of this.  That one day honey just does the list, and lo, the fixer-upper’s up and fixed,  the lawn at last trimmed low and all the laundry done, so give  it but a week or so and we'll at last begin to live the life we always imagined as something more than a growing list of pending repairs.  Of course, all this will come to pass only after the ballots are cast, the offices swept and emptied out  for our officials, who will, no doubt,  enact our will and set right the deluded line of thinking we’ve too long been governed by. Then once the baby sleeps through the night— or say instead the baby graduates and vacates the house—that will be our ticket to kick up our feet the way we've dreamed about and somehow come to expect, when we’ll rest as deep and long as Orion in repose, belt unclipped and bow leaned back in that ever-elusive posture of "rel...
Read more