In careful gondola buoyance, I am weathered. A burst appendix lost in words and fireworks. Mascara streaks in the sky. I have two things on my mind: iron and age. My body will need more metal as I grow older. I dream of Isaiah’s ascent as my bloodsugar lowers. Each heartbeat a prophecy: live, live, live. A Roman Candle in my hand, I am five in Dad’s Jeep again. The boys are harnessing the parking lot in trames of flame, and I sit holding the Noah’s Ark from the doldrummed basement, where a cracked plastic box of Power Rangers action figures congeals into a plastic crate stacked onto a stationary red Radio
Flyer who
has run out of dreams.
I fidget with the Ark
and its door until a
Matchbox Corvette
falls out.
What kind of animal am I?
I think as I hunt for
the glance of the rearview mirror. The
sparks run
across the Jeep’s hood, like an enchanting to bring the car to life. Now, three kinds of needles make me feel alive. Thomas says to me that on the day you ate what is dead, you made it into something living. There’s iron in my gummies and there’s steel in the sky. Anemic amorality crushes me into flint for the fire to come. But fire works in the chambers of the heart to douse our would-be accusers in a flood of the good.
