After the Prescribed Burn at Little Pine Lake
For days wisps of smoke slow ghost it all along the still water’s ember edge. I watch them shapeshift from the safety of my rented cabin just up the hill. Sleep & dream. Take notes. What lingers. What haunts. What rises & goes.
After the burning.
All This Way
My mother, alive again, speaking to me—what was it—from a small space near a window. A cramped space. An unfamiliar room. And the light there? Dull. Dim. Unremarkable. Light not lighting, not gathering, around my mother. Had I summoned her? This dreary space. She’d come all this way. Slipped in between two slats of bent blinds covered with dust. Slipped back into this bent & broken world. This porous universe. To tell me something. To tell me. To tell.
A hill
or the hill?
Little hill? No.
Take out little.
It is a hill after all
not a mountain. Not
the mountain. Not yet.
