[Ella Shively]

Fire Assignment, Happy Camp, California

under the flimsy green Forest Service tent,
we absorb with bland punching bag faces
the town’s complaints and questions,
gratitudes and screaming rants
and tales of close escape in fires past,
and the smoke grows tired
and sinks down on the sun-crisped lawns,
the weathered porches
with their empty rocking chairs,
really settles itself in like a cat
on a pillow somebody wants to sleep on

and every day we explain
how this smoke blew in
from a wilder fire
a hundred miles away.
our fire is a gentleman!
look how carefully he steps
through the underbrush
instead of racing to the canopy.
see how the sprawling manzanitas
wither and curl beneath his fingertips,
the dark, fertile ash
he spreads in his wake?

every evening over our muddy encampment,
the moon rises, red as our eyes
and fat, each night dwindling smaller
and smaller still,
like a clean flame that burns itself out,
leaving only the purest black substrate
in which to reseed the sky



***I'm not planning on publishing this one because I mention a government entity by name, but I am including it in my MFA application manuscript.