Fred Schmalz

Several Combustions

1. Here they forget how a horse stands
2. moments after being born. A woman
3. holds her breath and the flash
4. funnels light into her eye. There
5. it turns upside down and spits back
6. a railway’s pair of tracks. In her head,
7. the world is full of parallels.
8. An accident waits just out of sight
9. beyond earshot arriving most often
10. at meal times or cycling across
11. the parquet plaza by the license bureau.
12. Storefronts. Storm fronts. Some trigger
13. in the tile pattern casts her
14. into wreckage. She is not injured
15. but she is surrounded by rent bodies,
16. bent joists. She smells gasoline and rubber,
17. sees through black smoke. Then she disappears
18. into a streetcar’s path, believing
19. she will be reincarnated as a book of matches.
20. People will walk away before
21. she is struck, even though she is on fire.
22. The papers will report
23. other incidents of arson
24. in the neighborhood: two teens
25. rubbing their incendiary crotches
26. together in the patio darkness; a housewife
27. immolated by a jar of pills. She saddens
28. faced with buckets of sand which leave
29. her desires hidden, what is and isn’t
30. fire reduced to her brilliant neck,
31. two otherwise straight lines bent.
32. Everything else is glass
33. or neon gas inside glass
34. or slab on slab of marble.
35. She can barely stand heaven
36. cleaving the living from the rest.