Fires on Highway 192
After Neruda’s “Disasters”
In Florida, it was
raining ash because the fire
demanded it. I had to
point my car landward
and hope the smoke would
part, but it was a grey sea
absorbing my body.
Cabbage Palms were annihilated.
Even the Indian River
steamed. Black stalks stank.
The condominiums spit
smoke into twilight.
Still, a cattle egret
landed, preening, in a pasture
filled with embers – the
cattle dead or removed.
And I was hungry; there
was nothing to eat.
And I was thirsty and
raised the river to my mouth.
And I was alone, and
there was only that one egret
searching for a cow. The
wind was a whisper on my tongue.
Ash on ash. Slumber
shallow. I was a frown
in an unfamiliar city
after sundown. Vultures circled
like assassins. I made a
bed out of the road. I made a pillow
of misery and slept and
had no story I wanted to confess.
Used by permission.
From The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary
Jewish American Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2013)
Deborah Ager is founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine. Many poems first appearing in the magazine have
been honored in the Best American Poetry and
the Best New Poets anthologies and on
Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Ager is the co-editor of Old Flame: The First Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine and author of Midnight Voices. Her poems have appeared
in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West,
Los Angeles Review and Birmingham
Poetry Review and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, From the Fishouse, and No Tell Motel. She also co-edited The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary
Jewish American Poetry, in which this poem
appeared.
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