monday inside the burned house.


	amaze me machine. \| home my poetry monday inside the burned house. it's Monday in Tennessee nothing is warm now, when the clouds swallow the sun and it's mid march in a poor neighborhood where the children run around bare footed and cold. anita drives a beat up faded black volkswagen that informs us of his old age and aching past with a painful moan and cry on turns and at stop lights. anita is in what is left of auntie's house from where I am sitting it looks as if the footsteps of anita have turned the coal colored ashes blue auntie cries again and again I imagine the end of the small wooden house who invited fire (turned black) perhaps grandpa's cigarette won a battle with the fabric armchair or maybe an ignored kettle screaming, sparked the heat all the same auntie cried, and anita turned the dark ashes to blue the children across the street run in merry circles and disregard the ashy remains just a pavement away they play and play blind to pain, blind to auntie's tears, blind blind they laugh and giggle, run and scream, I witness spry games of simon says and hide and go seek they prance on untouched grass that belongs to a poor family of seven or eight probably the only pride the family knows- that grass green as peas, green green anita picks up black books whose attempts to make anita cry prove futile (you can't burn the burnt) she doesn't feel the scorching pain that killed auntie's home the pages soil her fingers she drops the book auntie cries she steps down on crisp cinders that crunch like dead leaves. the black ash penetrated the home through and through through each word on the page of every book turned black it makes its way through auntie's feeble heart makes a brick wall out of it a wall to deny further fire a black wall the children laugh untouched by grief on a gloomy mid march day, in a poor neighborhood, in tennessee they lift their legs and I see the bottoms of their feet the charred bottoms black with ash purple from scar I see painful blisters and calluses marked black like the books and soiled pages that have been burnt but won't burn these abscessed wounds turned black black like night black like fire black black and yet again black.