CALIFORNIA DROUGHT |
Meadow, orchard, longing: it’s true that I rename myself. It’s true that I remain myself, even with this town on fire. In this town of charred trees, everybody becomes a wreck, every body wrecked by smoke. In my hands, the heat of razed fields, hot as the smoke rising above the fields. It’s true: I find disaster and disaster finds me. After dark, I wind ivy around my hands, bind my hands behind my back—to meet a girl in the pasture, a girl I vow I won’t reach out and touch. I’ve starved for so long, she says—to reach out, touch. The world turns brown: brown ferns, browned flowers unfurling, brown hair petaling out like my petaled open fingers, bronzed with summer. And with summer comes the hunger, the smoke, the ash, ash-white milkteeth I found in the jewelry box hidden in my mother’s box-springs the year we thought the house would burn. That year, we watched the woods burn. And, now, I trace blackened trees, trace the blackened knee of the girl beneath me who fell bruised in the blackened forest. The forest is a ruined cathedral. Or I am the ruined cathedral, or the fire, or the meadow, or the orchard. |