Fire to Fire by Michael Dwayne Smith

Fire to Fire
 
M has not been cremated, has not even been near
the fires of Santa Rosa, though he keeps
looking into the hills from his front yard at night.
 
M has a friend, a brother really, flash evacuated three a.m.
—jump cuts grab what’s in front of you steer the car on instinct
orange cough lung heat undulating landscape traffic smoked bees
which way which way is away when can I breathe--
if they had been asleep: cremation.
 
And He cremated the world in six days.
 
M is watchful. Stays up reading about the woman who
ran from bullets fired by a Vegas mass-shooter
to witness her home turning to plume on a stranger’s TV.
She tells the reporter, “There are things that need to get done,
and I’ll deal with the rest later.”
 
Reads of the couple who dove into a neighbor’s pool,
endangered sea cows for six hours while the world was consumed.
And a couple trapped in a house, him a hundred, her ninety-eight,
found in each other’s arms, just bone and ash.
The drone videos of day three are Hiroshima.
 
And on the seventh day He rested.
 
M thinks about bearing witness. The burning down of D.C.,
Democracy, decency, all our little towns. We won’t go home again.
The New Americans of New America: just ash and bone.
 
And in the sky, behind an
ochrous shroud of smoke, the bloodshot eye of a dying god.

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Bio: Michael Dwayne Smith lives near a Mojave Desert ghost town with his family and rescued animals. His most recent book is Roadside Epiphanies (Cholla Needles Press, 2017). Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work haunts many literary houses--The Cortland Review, New World Writing, Skidrow Penthouse, Word Riot, Heron Tree, Pirene's Fountain, Gravel, San Pedro River Review, Monkeybicycle, burntdistrict--and has been widely anthologized. When not writing or teaching, MDS is editor of Mojave River Press & Review.

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