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  • Tracy K. Smith (bio)

These logs, hacked so sloppily their blonde grains resemble over-done poultry, are too thick to catch. I crumple papers to encourage the flame, and for a brief moment everything is lit. But the logs haven’t caught, just seem to smolder and shrink as the heat works its way to their center. Getting to what I want will be slow-going and mostly smoke. Years ago during a storm, I knelt before the open side of a blue and white miniature house, moving the dolls from room to room as my mother added kindling to the fire. It is true that death resists the present tense. But memory does death one better: ignores the future. We sat in that room until the wood was spent. We never left the room. The wood was never spent.

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Boulevard. She is currently a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

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