At the Obed Wild and Scenic River

My body was rich
with evidence of use:
welts wide and firm as dollar coins,
toes rubbed raw, forearms splintered

by split wood, some unknown
rash scattering my back
like rain. Camping alone, I was solitary
prey, easy quarry for the clouds of river-bred

bugs. I called it negligence:
the DEET unopened in the car,
citronella & peppermint oil sprayed lazily
onto my hat. The needle-nosed insects

flecking the exposed parts
of my limbs. But I came for this:
dissolution of the skin’s soft boundary, loss
of barrier between the world & whatever

I hold. I wanted to surrender
to something, to escape
the body’s rigid container, briefly,
and be borderless in the wild-dark—

drops of my blood
suspended by glassy wings,
glittering their bug-mouths, beads like tiny
pomegranate seeds as they buzzed away to find

another bare landscape
of flesh, where they’d bite and leave
a crimson mark of me, the stain of a kiss.

Oregon with Wildfire

Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real. — L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti


some trees need the fire
to exhale seed, to release what comes next.

this is not that. each tree opening like a box,
flame fingers’ wild unbraiding of the rough bark, the trunks
thick as a hundred wrists

acres gone
less erased than marked out a black sharpie wide
as a state or the west
every bit of land capped in sky the color of metal ready to brand
yards wetted with the garden hose,

the fire galloping over the hills: a band
of horses—
how to face that kind of power
insatiable & unable to reason
fire can jump a mile or more

say: jump like it’s a beast
hind legs corded thick
with muscle, eyes that render a body as ash

the smoke like one long rising wail

or the smoke thick as velvet a red curtain
lowering over the cast bowing deep and final
thin bodies wavering in the hot light
it has been closing night for years
the audience on their feet, clapping
and clapping and clapping