Kyle McCord

Fire

One thing I like is fire.
I like how it wants you
to smell like what you cook.
I like the smell and like
the song it hums
darkening brats
or marshmallows,
the song the beans
and meats sing.  I am
changing sings the world.
I have the funniest story
about how
I am growing as a person,
I tell the fire.
It does not laugh,
not like we laugh.
Is it a mean-spirited thing?
No, but it must change
the log or the sky
if lit from a cannon.
It is a hard thing,
changing the whole sky.
It is hard thing bursting
into this life.
It makes little paratroopers,
I think, watching it
with my sister and her fiancé
and the family she’ll join
in the suburbs of Chicago.
That is how I know
you are not like us,
I tell the fire.
Because what you touch
loves you.  What you touch
are budding leaves
or fully budded brambles or
dried apples dead in the snow.
Now I am just listing for you
the things Liz and I saw
hiking out of the gorge
like our friend hadn’t just
overdosed on Sudafed and alcohol.
Like our friend wasn’t going to live
as himself ever again.
The apples were like animal droppings
and when I woke in the car,
blue graves dug in the sky.
The earth was wet and deer
moved like commandos
through the snow.
As if their hooves
could be air.
As if they could leave
no trace at all.

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Some Notes on Arson

Before the train depot
became the law offices
of Hemphill and McClure,
it was a train depot.
Then an abandoned train
depot.  Then the county crews
tore out the train tracks,
clear cut the path
which didn’t want to be
a path after a while,
and, bam, bike trail.
And, bam, the train depot
became a brewery
for the out-of-town element.
The waiters lived in Des Moines.
The restaurant served duck
and burgers with quail eggs
and the summer was so sick,
so sick with tree rot
that Chris burned down
the portable school.
On the site of the old portable
the school built another portable
and Chris went to Juvie.
Chris should scare you.
It should scare you that
a kid like that could burn
another person in their sleep.
I could hear laughter when
I listened to the wind sniping
the reeds beside the gulch
where the worst element
hid their cigarettes,
kids like Chris who hated
the world out there
which, I admit, did not love
them much in return.
The next winter,
the bank foreclosed on
the restaurant and let it
go back to what it was
and let the fancy waiters
find work in Des Moines.
The county let Chris move home.
Because he is different now, they said.
But I know how people
circle like birds looking
for lost nests.
This world scares me so badly
some times that I need
to take you in my arms
under this white-hot sun.
I don’t want you to understand
me the way I understand me.
You say trains, and I think quail.
Someone lights a cigarette,
and I see foxes cutting hunger
through the trees.