Burn Girl

Burn Girl

for L

Born from the flames:

My new identity. You can address me as

one of the same. Do not

grill me, I will not answer. Turned

over, I’m done. See how plump,

how juicy? You can eat me.

Take me in, if you can. Ingest me,

if you can. You’ll find the heat

of the spotlight turned back on you,

you in your comfort, you in your complacence,

you with your taste for crash ‘n burn movies.

No, I don’t hate you, I just can’t live with you,

there in the shadows,

the shadow world, where they say is real life.

I exist in the light.

With the angels, whose tongues of fire

sing at a pitch too high

for ears of clay.

I miss your coolness, and the nearness

of the earth, the way fingers trace

and moist breath leaves its wake

on the back window of a speeding car,

propelling higher and higher,

shedding clothes for wings.

Back among you, fallen to earth,

I can only whisper, there is a reason for this.

Or an emissary of light, an incandescent flicker

to punctuate the shadows. You

may see me—a flash here

or there, out of the corner of your eye.

You think you know me from somewhere,

like a long lost memory

when all was light, and whole,

undifferentiated Love. I remind you

of the eyes of a newborn baby

that don’t see anything because

they are everything.

for dVerse Poetics~The Other

This is my poetic imagining of a young mother who nearly died trying to save her baby from a burning house. I do not presume to know how such a person thinks or feels. The poem is my attempt to apply my imagination to her being. The sketches are my own.