by Thomas Riesner
Urgency
I hustle from couch to kitchen to garden to gate, then
back again. Cough. Wince when I look at the sky.
Sitting down is hard.
The weeds want to be yanked.
It’s earlier this year. That orange-pink tinge. More intense.
The sun extraterrestrial. Which it is.
Air laced with tiny somethings. Puny fluttering
somethings seem to subsist on smoke. How much draft
can my house hold? Enough oxygen for three days?
Four days? Two weeks? More? Or less?
North of us, forests are restless. Critters scramble.
If trees could run, they would I think.
Bound by root, they stand their ground, rustle what
leaves they can clutch with spindly fingers.
Until sculpted skeletal ash, blackened timber.
The lettuce wants to be watered.
The mail wants to be grabbed.
News reports will say forest fires rage. I don’t think
they rage. I think they feast. On flora, on fauna, on that
which breathes.
Plumes blossom, smother mountain ranges and plains.
The plum tree flowered hardly a month ago.
Budding fruit now quietly droops, worries whether
light distilled into haze can replace rain and shine.
I can’t close my eyes. Visions of charred squirrels, shriveled
deer, choking moles, flaming wood-peckers choke me up.
Hot-red mayhem, I imagine. Silence screams out loud.
The dogs want to be walked.
The grass wants to be trimmed.
When I was little, my mom read to me about a koala
in Australia who nibbled on eucalyptus trees,
snuggled up to his mama. Until the fires came.
Angry red-yellow paint splashed across the quiet
book page, and baby koala hunkered and hovered,
morphed into orphan.
Koalas. They knew before we did.
Before doom descends, I prepare. Stack up water
bottles. Sort through masks. Rustle up some painter’s
tape,
fortify air gaps around glass panes and door frames.
Is this what war readiness felt like for my grandparents?
The tomatoes want to be coaxed.
The bird bath wants to be filled.
I have to remember to breathe while I can.
Do grumpy oaks and soaring firs feel the same?
Do flighty rabbits and loping herons?
Can I maybe catch a ride with one of them and
flee to … where? It’s odd how in the end,
survival comes down to
breath. This here, shared air, between all
creatures.
I move urgently. Flap about, really.
No rest for the living.
Alina Zollfrank from (former) East Germany loathes wildfire smoke and writes in the Pacific Northwest to get out of her whirring mind. Her essays and poetry have been or will shortly be published in Bella Grace, The Noisy Water Review, Last Leaves, Thimble, The Braided Way, Wordgathering, and Invisible City. She welcomes connections with other writers at https://zollizen.medium.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/alina.zollfrank.
Thomas Riesner is based in based in Leipzig, Germany and has been self-taught and intensively involved with painting and graphics since 1990. In addition to acrylic and ink paintings, drypoint etching is one of his artistic means of expression. Quite spontaneously and suddenly, it literally bubbles out of him. His expressive, intuitive style of painting is reflected in his seemingly archaic figures and pictorial elements. His pictures exude an atmosphere of originality and spontaneity, although most of the motifs are rather gloomy.