Arsonist’s Ode

1 Minute Read Time

A match being struck and catching fire — Photo by Ian Talmacs on Unsplash

You who sleep in ragweed and attic, 
draw your red tongue over asphalt,

eucalyptus, aloe, snowmelt. 
You who struck the match

below the mattress, illuminated
the imagination of soldier and child,

warped the faces of dolls, whom I saw 
devour a car whole on the interstate.

Destroyer of villages, the Cuyahoga, 
magnificent golden temples of Budapest—

wake! Every bent stalk of corn or dry 
feed is your opportunity. You who stood

behind flint, behind every disused hearth 
so long, stretch your arms

in the lint trap, the pile of rags 
in the hamper, whole walls

of fiberglass insulation. I dreamed of 
you in the stitching of a baseball, behind

the yellowed page of the library book— 
each leather fold in my wallet. Ignite

in my palms. Speak to me now through 
faulty wiring, filthy crawl spaces, cord-

wood. O auroras of heat, impersonator 
of suns, no sparrow or Cessna can escape

your black ceiling! Unquenchable 
demon, crouched and rising in full sun,

show me now to the canister of kerosene, 
the blowtorch sleeping on my workbench.

Colby Cotton

is from a small town in western New York. He is a graduate of the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he held the Fred Chappell fellowship in poetry. A recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he has had work in Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Sycamore Review, and Passages North, among others. He was a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.

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