Five Poems from Firefall
By Heather Lang-Cassera
The nest, the lint, the
fire which could have happened,
the oleander opening
white-hot petals in the Mojave summer
of our back yards
amidst our failing
houses,
the faceless triceratops
figurine, capsized on the sidewalk,
reminding us of an article about climate
change, one about how, just maybe,
global warming also brought about
the dinosaurs, yet we have neither
feather nor scale despite
weathered faces
from too many days of sun,
and this too shall pass,
the clouds and their quivering bodies,
because even something made
of so much water
can be considered as such,
an impulse to compare the momentary cracks
of lightning
to the fractured pavement
on which we walk, our feet
skipping like heartbeats
in chests deep and scared of thunder,
a burst of sound echoing, saying what
we never quite could,
while the fragments of unfound
solitude sift
through the corrugation
of a new-refrigerator box, emptied
and abandoned,
amidst the soft, light
wood-like, but not quite, smell |
of cardboard
waiting carefully just beyond the curb,
with all this
tender kindling our mouths
cannot preserve.
A creosote explodes in slow motion,
blooms like a supernova, something
we witness through science, something chosen
by the beholder, unavoidable
impulse, shallow taproots interwoven
again and again. We all need water,
bones formed like dripstone, like quick erosion,
like knowing and not knowing, becoming
an ever-arid cloud, each past unchosen.
Beyond the whimper of fire,
I will call for you,
this viscous memory walking barefoot in this
fragile morning.
Hunger lives within
the creases of my hands, never
quite knowing the patience
of need.
The memories I have forgotten,
the dorsal fins of freshwater fish,
long ago became the silver
of rafters above a home
ever in invocation, and then
never again.
In this modest light, I don’t need to be everywhere,
like a metronome,
a rhythm, the firefly starlight,
like toothmarks left again.
Tell the story of stillness,
a nearness, in the stranger
who waits for you beyond roads,
a careful unknown. Name her.
Dry-mouthed rivers, unobscured,
have not lured us to the brink
of an untamable
past, species fastened, soft
pink latched.
Everything waits,
and we must be still
to find it. Rhyolite shivers
in the morning,
theatrical in its unintention,
harbinger of the quiet.
Heather Lang-Cassera is the poetry editor for Black Fox Literary Magazine and a member of the Raleigh Review editorial team. She was a 2022 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellow and the 2019-2021 Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate. She teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Nevada State University. Heather is the author of Gathering Broken Light (Unsolicited Press, 2021), which won the NYC Big Book Award in Poetry, Social/Political. Her collection, Firefall, a book of ecopoems, is available through Unsolicited Press now.
