REBECCA ARONSON, "FIRE COUNTRY" (Issue 18)

FIRE COUNTRY

​

Beginning with a line from Tarfia Faizullah’s “West Texas Nocturne”

Because the sky burned, I had to unhinge
my sooty eyes from their lingering.

In the season of undoing, the tender heart-leaves
of the new are shredded

as soon as they arrive. Wind eats the view
and scalds a wrecked swath like a medieval dragon

as it moves across this land I’ve made
a home of. This is the land of the living,

despite what is buried here and the sand
with its urge toward erasure.

Everything is germinating,
and the horizon flares

with fires, distant and close, smoke
the color of sunglasses. I see

but my vision is skewed. Listen. I don’t want
to sound such yearning but the wind howls too

and means nothing by it. The hills are on fire
and the desert is on fire and the air is thick

with other people’s fires. And my own burning
is so small as to go unnoticed.

I am calling but the wind is busy
taking everything away.

ABOUT THE POET

Rebecca Aronson’s books are Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom and Creature, Creature. She was a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She has poems recently in South Florida Poetry Journal, Tishman Review, and others. She is co-founder and co-host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.