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The Best Reason to Write a Poem Is Still for Love H FARNAZ FATEMI PhillipVorlander, an assistant fire chief with the Madison,Wisconsin, Fire Department, fought the appointment of Debra Amesqua as chief of the department, claiming gender and race discrimination , since she was hired at the beginning of , complaining that she was considered and hired because she is Latina and a woman. He amended his complaint in September to include the fact that she is a lesbian. She sees faces in the flames where she aims the surging jets, and sleeps with her boots next to the bed, where her lover trips in the darkness of their lost sacred hours alone. She’s seasoned. Here’s another fire sparked by ancestry, her X chromosomes, or love. Her hands are scarred by last month’s backdraft and she doesn’t know her breaking point. This time, who will give up first? Perhaps she’ll survive with fourth-degree inhalation, and recover in time for the next housefire, months, or weeks, away. He looks at her and she is flattened, a life-size cut-out he would buy at the supermarket, THE BEST REASON TO WRITE A POEM IS STILL FOR LOVE 239 then take his picture next to like the presidential family or John Wayne. He sees her body in outline, no organs or innards, not the guts it takes to fight these blazes find a common goal next to men who will often hate her. He has no idea how many fires she’s put out or how many still nip at her heels. Some days she wants him to win so she can put the hose down. These are the days she forgets all about flesh— scars, softness, the way she melts next to her lover’s skin— and all about blood— its diseases, its necessity its legacies inside her. She is heatblind and the faces are gone, even his before her. But she wants to step into the whiteness of this inferno and search Madison for someone in his life with the power to change him: daughter, father, wife. She would become that person undress him in the daytime stand naked in front of him, say, look at what we’re wrapped in. See this soft scraped creamy dark thing? It’s life. 240 FARNAZ FATEMI ...

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