Fire

Weight of an air pack, axe in my hand.
Just before I clip into air--
            the stench of fear-sweat, acrid, alarmed, excited.
Wood splinters as we crash through a door.
The engines whine and rev high behind us, water spraying, blinding, people shouting.
            Something in my back splinters, too.

Keep going, press on, the ghosts say.

The man, he is there, just out of reach. Just up those stairs. Just through that door?
There is too much fire. The furnace blast of flashover
pushes us back out the door.
I will find him later, still almost standing.
A toppled redwood in a blackened forest.

Skin melts at 500 degrees, stretched gaunt over tight bones.
There is a model airplane-- fire engine red-- on the other side of the door.
             Intact. Unscathed.

Fifteen bullet holes in the skinny buddha's body, his blood
drenched onto scorched California earth, nurturing nothing, nothing.
His hand, still clutching the leash of a whimpering soft-muzzled doberman.
Three drifters, they will say. Senseless.
           Thoughts and prayers, they will say.
A wake of grief rippling an entire coast, like a funeral pyre.

Did he notice in that frozen moment the flash from the gun, before
flesh ripped, before gasping dreams spilled forth, uncontained?

The blonde head of my son, hair thick and smelling of campfire.
If the shooter comes to the classroom, mom, you just
drop off the ledge and out the window.
You'll only break an ankle, maybe a leg, but probably not the whole thing.
Other wise, you have to charge him, throw a chair.
His large blue 12-year-old eyes contemplate the physics
of facing death.

A car backfires outside
I lurch my body over him.
            Geez, mom, it's just a car
            and anyway, I have homework to finish.

My anger and grief are steam rising off the back of a hard run horse
galloping, frantic and seeking familiar pasture.

Where is the safety, who will be the rescuer
in this hot, sticky, salty viscera?
Sirens light through the dark sky in the distance
Familiar, comforting, haunting.

These ghosts and I, sitting outside the fire, gazing in.
Our reflections dance, entwine, ensnarl
Eyes glittering, rapt in the distant shimmering heat.



©2016 Dacia Grayber