22. Poetry from the Editor
Editor’s Note: This poem is based on my first experience with a forest fire, the first of many, as a kid growing up in California.
Fronds | Art by Nigel Suckling
The Fire Devil
Pissing a thin, burning stream of bloody urine on scintillating embers was not what I had in mind. Too much chewable vitamin c, not candy after all, and too little water. Fighting the forest fire in any way that I could. Every little bit helps.
Aluminum in silver puddles, each a Picasso of orange and red flames, while jewels of liquid glass dance the light hypnotic.
Smoke rises. A deep, gray veil. People move as worker ants among black blades, a harvest of the blast furnace.
I find a metal canteen of warm water in a panic, the horror of peeing blood more concerning to me than the horror of the flames at that particular moment.
California is ablaze. Nothing new in that. Summer is hot, hotter with the flames, painted in a palette of reds, oranges, and yellows.
Borate bombers drop their sticky-red liquid and we drop to a knee. They say it can break your back.
We accept its toxicity. A devil’s bargain. More ecological debt. More chemical reactions.
The Devil’s cocktail. A big Molotov, shaken not stirred and exceptionally combustible.
Above a forest fire, smoke rises billowing as genies bursting forth from the bottle of their long, carbon imprisonment. Flowing upwards in dark robes above the radiant savagery below.
If the Devil is not the fire, then the fire is his parlor.
And he reclines gleefully within.
Conflagration as sporting event. A raucous spectacle of combustion. Volatility his forte. Incineration his raison d’être. Fire his joie de vivre.
The conflagrationiste. An artist of flame. Flame as brush. Flame as paint. Forest as canvas of fire. A masterpiece of char.
I have heard the tales of a red shadow. A vaporous figure moving slowly among the towering torches, a great cloak of trailing flame. Stopping to admire the most exquisite of embers. The finest of flames. Fire as a Parisian ideal. Destruction, an engulfing haute couture.
I have heard, too, the stories of flying saucers hovering obscured in the smoke and illuminated in the lightning flashes of summer storms that spark the blazes that become great, consuming metropolises of fire.
The Devil rides a UFO. Lucifer, the bearer of flame. The morning star of driven fire.
Avenues of flame. Forest fire, the Devil’s own parade. Firebrands. His confetti. Walls of flame. His floats on grand display. Cotton candy flames. Flame on a stick. Firewhirl pyrotechnics. And geometries of ash, descending as ticker tape from high-rises of flame.
Hear his throaty laugh. Echoing. In the red roar of the inferno. The click of his tongue in the snap-crack of the fire. His whoop! in the legions of orange suns roiling skyward through the canopy.
A great and many iterated flamerise. A flamefeathered serpent. Quetzalcoatl! Kukulkan! Q’uq’umatz! Tohil! Orange flashes ascending red into the darkening blue.
His whistle in the clear swords of steam piercing outwards from green wood. His whisper in the scorching winds. Feel his hot, dry breath on your bloodshot eyes.
Hear his spent disdain . . . in the silence of the ash.