1
The night we returned home, burning ashes
floated in air like fireflies. We heard the
sirens ring through the night; school was out,
and we could just make out a red streak
across the highway. Our home was filled
with strangers, and their clothes smelled like
tires, and tears, and metal, and the Diaspora
of neighbors, some homes are only cinders; smoke
clogging our city, like Atlantis underwater,
and our lungs split and torn, until we breathed
the sun. We left as soon as we heard
the phone ring: the tree in our yard was already
aflame, carrot blazes licking cherry autumn leaves.
Fire: beautiful fire, we dance in your light, we
feast in your heat, we pray in your opulence,
we burn in your flames. We burn in your flames.
2
The last thing we left was my parents’ wedding
videotape. When our car was past the mountains,
past the city, past the fire: when we were all but safe,
we heard nuptial harmonies crackle in the flames.
The night we returned home, we found the
Bible under the rubble, unscathed leather:
we are our brother’s keeper, “Am I?”
Fire is the wrath of trees; it is the sun’s dooming
gaze, father’s deep unforgiving glaze;
Fire is a red sky, slithering like a snake
through empty streets, until its tail is caught
in its mouth. Endless, it pierces through walls like
soldiers of war—flame, flesh and glass,
it never loved anyone but itself.
. At first, I was a little concerned that this would just be a story in verse, and the start is. However, the end of the first part, and the entire second, I 
