Arian Katsimbras
Brushfire #237 Outside of Reno, Nevada
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When Bill McKibben declared “The End of Nature,” in 1989, he was posing a hyperbolic kind of epistemological riddle: What do you call it, whatever it is, when forces of wilderness and weather, of animal kingdoms and plant life, have been so transformed by human activity they are no longer truly “natural”? – David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth.
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Right now, another fire in the haunted north
takes everything back – a piece of sky
the sky has no right to claim, the cattle-
field that is my father, old undergrowth
that is my mother, the coyote bone wind
chimes slung low on a ranch fence –
and this fire it tells me it wants my son crowned
in thicket and soot. Later, this young king
will stand outside the pines, a tangerine glow
softening his skin into honey, exhausted
from the already buckshot pocked west,
the razor-wired climate wrapped around
the rest of his life, this permanent
and inane serpent of rust and blood
and really what’s the point in any of this
metaphor anyhow? It scrapes up enough to say
someone wuz here once, I guess? But weren’t we
radiant? We the anti-Anthropocene? We
anticipants bossoming our hungering child
-shaped apologies until we become both shovel
and self-filled graves, our hands listing earth
toward the triple-six digits in the air –
it’s gonna be another scorcher, folks, in the re-origin
of species; please, the last one alive, turn
the lights off in this accidental furnace.
My son will feel birds tremble his mouth,
and a ladder flame hollowing him out
rung by rung at his middle, and I’ll tell him
the bellied flames are just the last birds
of every fire on their way out. Don’t be afraid
that I am afraid. Entire galaxies of light
will born from his mouth and for a moment
he will be radiant. He will be radiant.
takes everything back – a piece of sky
the sky has no right to claim, the cattle-
field that is my father, old undergrowth
that is my mother, the coyote bone wind
chimes slung low on a ranch fence –
and this fire it tells me it wants my son crowned
in thicket and soot. Later, this young king
will stand outside the pines, a tangerine glow
softening his skin into honey, exhausted
from the already buckshot pocked west,
the razor-wired climate wrapped around
the rest of his life, this permanent
and inane serpent of rust and blood
and really what’s the point in any of this
metaphor anyhow? It scrapes up enough to say
someone wuz here once, I guess? But weren’t we
radiant? We the anti-Anthropocene? We
anticipants bossoming our hungering child
-shaped apologies until we become both shovel
and self-filled graves, our hands listing earth
toward the triple-six digits in the air –
it’s gonna be another scorcher, folks, in the re-origin
of species; please, the last one alive, turn
the lights off in this accidental furnace.
My son will feel birds tremble his mouth,
and a ladder flame hollowing him out
rung by rung at his middle, and I’ll tell him
the bellied flames are just the last birds
of every fire on their way out. Don’t be afraid
that I am afraid. Entire galaxies of light
will born from his mouth and for a moment
he will be radiant. He will be radiant.
When I Dreamt Only in the Colors of Cempasúchitl
– after Roger Reeves
Each night on the phone, my son slips into wind.
Each morning, he raises a forest to his lips,
drinks the hennaed light through the pines.
Look, his hands are two warring miracles,
his body a fulcrum to raise the earth around him
until he breaks. But there is no sound in this moment.
Over time his body becomes river-shore where trees
that make the best light-canoes to quit the land in
keep splitting and the grain can’t keep straight,
and the tumblehome is wrong and the river wars
with dead horses it’s called back home. I carry this
coalition of bereavement on a gunshot breeze,
cross the boundary waters, the animal that I am,
stack my bones neatly like this, spilled salt at dusk.
Each night on the phone, my son slips into wind.
Each morning, he raises a forest to his lips,
drinks the hennaed light through the pines.
Look, his hands are two warring miracles,
his body a fulcrum to raise the earth around him
until he breaks. But there is no sound in this moment.
Over time his body becomes river-shore where trees
that make the best light-canoes to quit the land in
keep splitting and the grain can’t keep straight,
and the tumblehome is wrong and the river wars
with dead horses it’s called back home. I carry this
coalition of bereavement on a gunshot breeze,
cross the boundary waters, the animal that I am,
stack my bones neatly like this, spilled salt at dusk.
Arian Katsimbras is the author of the full-length collection, The Wonder Years (Texas A&M University Press, 2023). He lives in Reno, Nevada.