Vulgar Remedies: Poems

Confessions of a Firestarter

11 Confessions of a Firestarter Someone arrest me here in this city park where an ivory heat combs itself in slow strokes from the swamp. Where a jogger and her mallow-jowled Rottweiler have just spontaneously combusted—only nipples of the dog collar’s nickel screwback spikes lie in the trail’s crowsfoot violets. No vertebrae. No clothes. The newspaper knows a layer of methane hangs over the water, ready to spark. Or maybe it’s my dark night terror that recurs in which an old alchemist whispers as she sits on my chest, sizzles her palms to my shoulders until my elbows turn heavy as gold. I don’t need a cigarette to set this trail burning. I don’t need any learned advice: 12 Leave your man. Run to another. One thought of you will char this city. One thought of that nineteenth-century hotel with its ivy-drowsed courtyard of brick where Poe played as a child, where he whipped a single chrome wheel with a violet birch branch until the stick snapped between spokes. Where you wrapped your black belt around my throat after I asked. I hear sirens. I hear the twitchy armadillos shiver from the warp of a near highway’s whine. In the water, the cypress knees jut their muscled limbs from the green ferment, rigormortised , white. Like those women who kicked a long time before giving up a finger, a red 13 dress, a breath, an overtongued name. Before each of them gave her face to the swamp which, as I pass by, remembering, flames. This page intentionally left blank ...