Fire Ecology
Today there are no mosquitoes
because there are wildfires.
It is a necessary kind of
burning, black death and green rebirth,
like a wasp digging into the sweetness
of the fig, where it drowns.
Every passing year the fires become
less cleansing, more omen.
The spruce beetles carve map-lines
into leaves to places
with no human name, just as
there is no name for the color
of this bright cool orange-gray smoke-sky
holding us like the skin holds blood
at the surface,
for the parasites to find.
◊ ◊ ◊
Anthecology
The peonies have over-bloomed, drooping
layered petal-heads to dark soft ground.
I might become a ghost, I might perform
a vivisection of the heart. I might erupt
as the thick globe of a flower-bud.
Touch me, please, where no-one else
can reach, for I am full
of wanting. The air is full of warning,
warming, worming between all my silken
threads. Unlike pollen, I cannot be easily detached
from the anther. So make me ether.
Make me either monument or tomb, whichever
pleases. Water freezes at the pleasure-pitch,
so watch me switch
to ribboned stone. Pull me from this pulsing
womb and hold me till the bleeding’s done,
hold me still against your temple
made of bone. In the moisture, pollen gathers
water to itself like gravity, collects
and falls to rotten earth. Say that there are laws
of chemistry against which we cannot
bend. Say that there is always
something blooming at the end.
Zeke Shomler earned a Combined MA/MFA at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He now teaches secondary math. A four-time Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in AGNI, Modern Language Studies, The Shore, and elsewhere.
