When She Speaks of the Fire by Melissa Crowe
When She Speaks of the Fire
……………………………she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
……………………………is that of pines and twitching leaves
……………………………and how her body is like neither—
……………………………KATIE FORD
I didn’t know the term then—cul-de-sac—
just knew at the bottom of its belly
spread a permanent yard sale, old handsy
man with a greasy gaze who priced
his bait (ceramic cats and china dolls
and tin kazoos) so high I couldn’t buy
anything. On either side lived girls
from my school, pink cheeks
and aquanetted hair. Girls on skates who rolled
down the throat of that street. Now
when we meet, their memories are
different from mine. One says, these years
later, I knew better than to go there. Fine.
Wired to forgive and to beg forbearance,
to mistrust my own intentions, I lay still
in my narrow bed and asked God to spare
every soul I knew from the poison
thoughts that might escape my head
and sicken them. To imagine the same
as to curse, anyone for whom I failed
to ask the Lord’s protection
struck down the next day, so my prayers
could last all night: don’t let Mama’s cancer
come back, Lord; don’t let there be razors
in my sister’s candy apple; Lord, spare us
annihilation should the Russians finally
drop their bombs on Loring AFB. Let my
parents find out, don’t let my parents
find out about the man, the man’s hands.
And having heard them joke about spontaneous
combustion, I prayed, Dear Jesus, don’t let
that sudden fire burn in me.
There’s what happened in the bedroom
into which my friend’s father carried me
on the day of the pool party, but what
happened before we cleared its threshold
(fingers slid beneath the loose crotch
of my suit) is the only thing I know I know.
I also know when that man’s face appeared
on our TV three years later—family gathering,
mother, grandmother, aunts making
cabbage rolls in the galley kitchen, within
earshot of the local news, or bringing
my uncle a beer, their fingers greased
with hamburger meat, a smear still on
the bottle in my uncle’s hand—everyone
recognized him, our old neighbor, so-and-so’s
father, bus driver for the training center,
aboveground pool in his backyard summers,
and winters he flooded a patch of shoveled
lawn and built a skating rink, set up karaoke
in his garage, a stage and wired mics
for the neighborhood kids to sing
Kenny Loggins, the soundtrack to Footloose
all the rage that year. They could see his
mugshot, those women who loved me.
They could hear he’d been arrested for
molesting the kids he drove to school.
Upstairs in my room was the small guitar
my parents had given him permission
to give me. Thank god I thought, burning,
somebody will ask me. Nobody asked me.
Thank god I thought, burning, knowing
for the first time maybe what he’d
done to me, that what he’d done to me was
wrong enough to go to jail for, if you told.
Nobody asked me. I understood they knew
already. I understood they didn’t want to know.
I read animals can sense any disaster
that’s natural—smelling wildfire, they run
or stand in water or hide under rocks
or bury themselves in the dirt. Some die
in the flames, the very old, the young,
but most survive to starve or wander,
homeless, into cities, dangers their noses
can’t detect—aftereffects more deadly
than the blaze itself—so when a hand
sets fire to the woods, it incinerates a day
and suffocates a future. I’m saying
the arsonist’s a villain—this villainy
the kind we have to breathe: it fills the air,
our lungs, with choking smoke for miles,
for weeks. But when they asked why
of the man who, with a flick of his wrist,
lit up the Nantahala National Forest
and he said he just wanted to see something
burn? I didn’t hate him. I’d been engaged
in such long calibration, careful how much
heat to release. Careful not to speak what I
wouldn’t like to hear myself say. But words
inside a body can ricochet—maybe you’ve
felt it, too. Listen, I’m afraid of matches.
Nobody had to warn me not to play with fire.
My uncles burned garbage, didn’t they?
I thought maybe that man had swallowed
so much rage everything to him was garbage.
And what about me? Girl to whom language
seemed an element so reactive it wanted only
my breath to ignite it, each word a sliver
of phosphorous I held in the dark of my mouth.
the most dangerous (they didn’t)
……………….moment comes when a window
……………….……………….breaks (ask me) air sucked
……………….into the airless
space a helpless (they didn’t ask me)
……………….respiration sudden
……………….……………….involuntary breath
……………….before the room gone
still and silent reignites my chest
……………….hurts when I
……………….……………….imagine giving you this
……………….story it hurts when I
keep it to myself you know (they didn’t
……………….ask me) what I want? I want
……………….……………….to have nothing
……………….to tell or for everyone
who lodged a cinder in any
……………….kid’s throat to go
……………….……………….to hell (they didn’t)
……………….the only thing worth saying
maybe? (ask me) this body
……………….wasn’t for you (they didn’t
……………….……………….ask me) this body isn’t
……………….for you but friend, can you (they didn’t)
forgive me if I’m still (ask me)
……………….not sure what good saying it
……………….……………….can do what harm saying (they
……………….didn’t ask me) will do?
One uncle said her tits looked
nice in her sweater, told her
to twirl in her skirt. One uncle
laughed, muscling the cousins
into his massive arms where they
dangled, bodies pressed together
till they cried. When one uncle
visited, he wore gym shorts without
underwear, sat in the easy chair,
his leg over its arm, cock and balls
displayed for her between slack
cotton and hairy thigh.
In the night kitchen, one uncle
held a gun to the head of one
girl’s mother, slit the kitten’s
throat. Two uncles one latchkey
day made their way into the
house, the bedroom. One uncle
held the closet door closed
on her brother while the other—
I’m afraid to tell you the rest, afraid also
to leave you on that em dash forever,
watching through a crack as thick as a man’s
fingers what unfolds beyond your power
to undo. Maybe you’ve been trapped these
long years, too. Of course, any house can be
a closet, the mind can be a closet, and some
basement-nautilus-jacked arm, some world-
harmed, harming clown still bars the door.
When I was four, an older kid
had a playhouse, windowless
plywood walls and a rough-cut door
with a padlock on the outside.
(It was a shed, not a playhouse at all,
that’s just what he called it,
the way the mugshot man would later
call a pool the plastic muckhole in which
he lurked below the surface wearing
goggles.) There I was lured and locked
in—we were playing house, but an hour
passed in that splintery dark before
I knew the game was different
and cried out. I can’t remember
rescue or escape, whether the boy
returned or my mother
heard my panic and her face appeared
in a widening crack of light.
I say this to myself to save
myself: You were right.
They didn’t want to know.
And you were smart to grasp
the way the elders turned
their backs, returned to their
crockpots, spread the meal
before you, whose eyes they
could or would not meet.
Maybe some of them choked
on what they tried to swallow,
swallowed what they might
have said. But to stay free
don’t we have to call a hole
a hole, a goddamn shed a shed?
In wild fantasies I use my own
two feet to kick that flimsy
door apart—I can smell its rotting
wood and feel the sweat that wet
my back. In even wilder fantasies
I burn it to the ground, sometimes
after, sometimes before I’m found.
My good husband—he was
screaming, too, from a closet,
in the clutch. He’s out here now
with me, we’re both alive. We touch.
Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), and her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Four Way Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, and Thrush, among other journals. She’s the coordinator of the MFA program at UNCW, where she teaches poetry and publishing.
20 December 2021
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