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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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