The Longest Fire Season

December 19, 2017

Oakland December, north
country ash, SoCal burning.
No hearth fire for the holidays.

Red flag warnings, face-mask handouts,
voluntary, then mandatory evacuations.
Smoke so thick it’s like an eclipse,
gets a bit darker and colder.

Santa Ana winds, sundowner winds,
rush down canyons to the sea.
Ash falls like snow. Coyotes and rabbits
leap through yards from flames.

My parents loaded the dog, violin
and family photos into the van, drove
north from their gated community.
Hunkered down in Pismo Beach,
waited a week to see if they have
a place to go home to.

The undocumented are afraid
to go to the shelters.
Horses scream in the stables.

Meanwhile, the beautiful sunsets.

Bel Air’s mansion-incinerator
started in a homeless camp
cooking fire. Poetic justice.
We’ll all go together when we go.

 

________

Jan Steckel’s poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her chapbooks Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California, USA. 

________

Fire at a homeless encampment sparked Bel-Air blaze that destroyed homes, officials say
[Los Angeles Times]

Previous Story

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rope

Next Story

The Prophet and the Tax Bill

Latest from Environment

Photograph of a sawtooth fish, like the ones being endangered in Florida, swimming in blue waters.

The Thrashing

In the Florida Keys, fish like the endangered sawtooth are circling to death. What prophecy is this?
Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree at Night

Owl in the City

By Joan Glass. A wild owl found nestled in the branches of Rockefeller's Christmas Tree shows us how to survive.

Self-Immolation

By Jessica Michael. A song of mourning for the day Philadelphia's skyscrapers silenced 1,400 songbirds forever.
Go toTop

More Like This

The Latest Extinction

By Christen Noel Kauffman. Conservations fear an entire species of marsupial has been extinguished by the Australian wildfires.

Incantation Against Burning Amazon Rainforests

By Stephen Scott Whitaker. "Open land, open air, open earth, swing open all doors. Oil hinges with oil syllables, Bolsonaro. Bolosonaro."