by L. Acadia
The bear taught us to fight fire
This is not a ghost story
for we are not yet dead.
Who is to say what we fear
& what has changed when we know nothing.
Two black bears venture into a town
With boarded windows
Their bosky home again on fire.
Tilting change echoes into roaring streets
Forests undergrown, undercut, aflame.
Trees always sigh right before screaming.
It is never easy to know that always
Gravity discovers you, but
My father raised me tall.
Planted me deep in a place
I carved into dark clay earth,
Itself, the bark of the forest.
Trampled, blooded, and burnt.
What is owed to the wood? To the skin?
Both alive and decaying.
Depreciating daily with leases unpaid.
Cortisol floods, but only increases the smoke
the stag breathes in, only narrows the field
where vixens run through ash and the sequoia sighs
twice more yet my body can remember neither.
Still the ax will aim to cleave at what will hold
once again, not nearly enough to put out the fire.
Danielle Fleming is a social worker, dog mom, and writer living in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband. Her work has been featured in Bellarmine Magazine, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Tiger Moth Review and is forthcoming in Perch Arts and Literary Magazine and in The Hopper. She can be found on Instagram as @havendf or twitter @danismalley10.
L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University, a dog pillow at home, and otherwise searching Taipei for ghosts and vegan treats. L. has a PhD from Berkeley and creative work published or forthcoming in Autostraddle, The Dodge, Lothlorian Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, Neon Door, Subterranean Blue Poetry, and Typehouse Magazine. Twitter and Instagram: @acadialogue.