The Meteorologist Says He’s Glad to See the Smoke
Air quality index 182 (unhealthy)
Because fire crews hate it and eat it and vote.
Because it’s unsightly, unseemly, searing
like a weepy eye. Because it interferes. It grits.
It works its worms into the tubes of the lungs.
Because we can’t build a wall to keep it out.
Because we can see it, an atmosphere we sawed
and felled. Because it clings to our clothes
like the smell of a long and stupid night
we barely remember but now
have to live in forever.
The Window
Air quality index 343 (hazardous)
We knew it was open by the smell. Spent
a half-hour looking for it, found it (old
beauty in its tall white sash), upper pane
slipped a half-inch open, one of the few
in the building that hadn’t been painted
shut (old beauty, tawny brick and swallows’
hiding holes). Now we could see
the currents of smoke outside like locusts
shadowing the sky, like the earth said
screw this, go ahead and light a fire.
I opened the window wide (old, heavy
beauty, lower pane a precarious clear-eyed
sheet) to reach the upper half, then
shoved it hard up against the wood
(old, soft) and closed it and locked it.
And I’m telling you, what was out there
smelled like it wanted to kill us.
Playing Tennis in the Smoke
Air quality index 174 (unhealthy)
It feels so good to smash,
to sweat. It feels like coals
are roasting in the throat, like soot
seals the skin in its damp coat.
It’s hot and the air can barely
haul its ass and one of us
makes a scorching lob,
a sweet back-corner kiss
like a patch missed by flames.
And we laugh and somebody
fans her face with her racket
like we are the ones on fire.
The Berry Seller
Air quality index 97 (moderate)
Her face looks like smoke already.
All week she’s picked blueberries,
blackberries, yellow suns, red
droplets. All week in her smoke mask
as if removing a heart. For the buyers,
she shows her face (smoke already
stored away, a story to be retold
in the dark cells of her body), the mask
behind the cash box, her eyes
(red suns) turned toward the cartons
I’m lifting, the glistening
sweetness I’m taking.
Air Tanker Departs Medford at 11 p.m.
Air quality index 189 (unhealthy)
When the fire swept over,
people said train and truck
and storm. They took
what little. Some never
made it home and heard
the thunder on the news,
from neighbors,
from scanners,
imagined the sound
of their dogs and cats
for weeks, a roar
that took. A boom
at night that left
a trail of sound
they still can hear.
Everything
Air quality index 427 (hazardous)
Everything looks
like a cemetery: the ashed gray oven
of arching bricks that once
was a restaurant, the black
round mouths of somebody’s
washer and dryer. Three bent, black metal
staircases where my friend’s apartment
held her paintings,
where my friend’s apartment
held his scripts. The pockmarked
furnace of my friend’s house and all
the toys he and his kids
couldn’t carry, everything rendered down
to flake and grit.
Now everything is sifted
by workers in blue gloves
looking for lost rings,
for anything solid, while
the innards of the streets lie
pulled up like long aquatic weeds
laid in mud next to
a spewing hydrant. Trees
spike their thousand black pikes
of petrified hair. Everything’s sharp,
sharp taste, a pickup fanning
a sharp white cloud
of dust from the empty driveway
that once held a sign—The Hardens—
and a low blue house
that now is nothing. Nothing
is blue or green, no bright
but the big vinyl banner
saying Thank you first responders. Alone
on a street between
what was saved and everything lost,
the woman walking has changed,
her face turned down as dry leaves
blow over everything,
a dust of black and gray glinting
with bits of glass.
Amy Miller’s Astronauts won the 2022 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, and her full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Catamaran, Copper Nickel, Narrative, Rattle, RHINO, and ZYZZYVA, and she received a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship. She lives in southern Oregon.
Read two poems by Amy Miller in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Brigitte Werner, courtesy Pixabay.
