You Have to Listen with Soft Lips to this One
After the Camp Fire consumed my home in Paradise, California.
The rain came a week late,
battling a dream that
refuses to leave.
I found a lantern.
One bent and warped from holding
too much light, whose
filaments dissolved into the ash
where life once lingered.
Twisted glass whose gnarled fingers
clutch at the remains of empty spines that
once held the wise words of
wretched men and
loose women.
“It’s not enough,” she said
to the beard behind the bar.
“Fill it to the top.”
Flickering light in the corner where
Emergency Exit leads into a
bathroom brawl
hauls her out of a daisy dream
where she slipped that fall,
when the sky broke
and the earth rolled over
in ashen blanket of defeat,
toes to the sky in supplication
to the heat that singed our
souls.
Singing a dirge for the
things
that are only just beginning
to die.
Fire
After the Butte Fire consumed the home my father built over 30 years ago, where I spent many a reluctant summer vacation.
That redwood tree
has a burned out hollow
just the right size for me.
The fire swept through at
three thousand degrees,
burning the tree
from the inside out.
If I slip inside,
I can smell the iodine
from that time I skinned my knee
but the bandage would not stick.
I covered it with posies
and rose petals,
then wished myself
away.
Heather Rayann is a lifelong lover and writer of poetry, a painter, a teacher, and a mother of two boys residing in Northern California.
Photographs by Wren Tuatha, of charred trees at her home in Magalia, California, within the Camp Fire zone.
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