~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Elizabeth Cranford Garcia

Meditations on a Burn Pile

            —October 2016

Five months it’s been here, the masts

of hundreds of pines splayed

like shipwreck, a forest

disassembled, the needles now

browned and arcing like palsied wrists.

The ground had quivered at each felling,

the body’s first clue this was more

than a theory of home improvement,

resounding waters inside us saying

there’s no turning back

the crack of each branch fracturing

some covenant whose syntax we’ve forgotten

words long blotted out that live only in the bone.

One day with a chipper and twenty extra hands

and still, the ground was covered with limbs,

the resilience of all that stress wood

reduced to apocalypse, some rough beast

born in our backyard.

***

We didn’t know how long it wouldn’t rain,

how the air would turn against our fingertips,

our lips, that fires would lick clean

the little bones of the forests just to our north,

the townspeople trapped in hotel rooms,

imagining all that smoke can do first:

blindness, a slow suffocation

the swallowing of ash,

dust turning all it touches to a likeness

of itself, like good intentions.

Is there ever a time to light a match,

to turn to cinder what might be the world?

***

Before the infinite, the body shrinks, the mind

forgets it’s capable of counting,

a soldier discovers the bodies piled and piled,

contemplates his little part:

Fold the arms over the breast.

Cover the scrotum.

Find one thing

to take back from the executioner.

***

Except, in this equation,

I am not the foot soldier.

I am the one by the pit

with the pistol.

***

Or the architect with no thought

of aftermath, no stomach

for ramification, just sick and tired

of mosquitoes, weeds in the gutters,

the nightly black surprise of palmetto bug in the bathtub,

canopy thick as sponge with foreboding,

its opacity like some burden of the past,

or worse, our present blindspots,

the fear of somehow ending up

(scream) like our parents.

***

Can the destroyer elegize

the thing she’s destroyed

without revising

whose suffering deserves the song?

***

In one version of this story

we have banished the darkness.

In another, we have only

a drier, hotter sky

a great scalded

franchise of light

and we die

from some O’Henry irony

daylight’s bright abrasions

a lesson in hindsight.

***

Every morning, I stare at it,

wondering if we are better off,

what it is we cannot accept in ourselves,

if anything bucolic will come of this, in time,

why there is no prerequisite greater than powertool

for deciding something should cease to exist,

for undoing a hundred years of singular purpose,

every branch on its own slowest journey,

to find the light, to bear

some kind of passable fruit.

Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s debut collection, Resurrected Body, received Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, Image, RHINO, Chautauqua, Rappahannock Review, Portland Review, CALYX, and Mom Egg Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an MFA student at Georgia State and mother of three. Read more at elizabethcranfordgarcia.com.