by Jim Ross
Fire-Nerves
Summer smoke wanders from room to room,
scatters shreds of orange paper.
I am losing the words
for weather, the heights of clouds,
how broken they seem, how instead smoke’s
never satiated. Now I see
fear comes from burning.
I want to tell someone
but the phone rings to nothing.
This was my safe place, I tell silent finches
who line the funeral fences.
These molecules were the owl.
This layer on a railing, two fawns
and their mother, or the mother
of someone. Ash as tremulous
as the touch of aged hands,
disbelieving: my old auntie,
aged eighty-nine, who ran
into the outhouse on the farmstead
and shut herself in.
Jayne Marek’s seventh and eighth poetry collections will come out in 2024 and 2025. Her writings and photos appear in Rattle, Terrain, The New York Times, Spillway, Bloodroot, Calyx, Catamaran, One, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere. She has provided cover art for Typehouse, Chestnut Review, Silk Road, Bombay Gin, Amsterdam Quarterly’s 2018 Yearbook, and The Bend, as well as for four full-length poetry books. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she writes, photographs, and learns about natural history.
https://www.facebook.com/jayne.marek.1 https://www.pw.org/content/jayne_marek.
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding research career. With graduate degree from Howard University, in nine years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in 200 journals on five continents. Best-of-the-Net nominated, his photo publications include Burningword, Camas, Feral, Phoebe, Stonecoast. Photo-essays include Kestrel, Pilgrimage, Sweet, Typehouse. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains. https://www.instagram.com/abracadabra5476.