Hotshot

“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do,”
              my mom consoles her friend, upset about
her son. Both women quit smoking, but we’ve all seen how
              a lit cigarette can catch like a lost fishhook hungry for flesh.
Most wildfires ignite from human oversight,
              but you can’t blame the mother. In his garage 
my cousin playing with matches set his back ablaze,
              shoulders and side flared up from fumes and flash 
gas over his body like a barreling wave.
              My grandmother warned us all our lives, told 
and retold our grandfather’s chin, the smooth
              curl of his jaw, the day she rolled him in the rug 
wielding her sweater like an ax, she beat
              her husband bald. Stories would not have stopped 
our neighbor John, who killed a boy once while
              driving drunk or high or maybe both. You’d never know 
the size of a death inside someone. My mom’s friend warns
              her son of DUI checkpoints so he can drive 
around them. She is still paying his fines from last time.
              Her son smokes on his mother’s stoop, drinks on 
his mother’s couch, and drives his mother’s car
              to the bar because it’s nice, because it’s 
air-conditioned, and because he sold his truck
              for beer and pills. One car is never enough, 
and he’s not back come morning, so his mom Ubers
              to work and cries at my mom’s kitchen table 
about her little boy who will be thirty soon.
              After this, my mother hangs thick curtains so 
she doesn’t have to see him ash his mother’s hours
              into the grass. How can anyone prevent
a fire like this? His mother cashes out her 401(k), 
              she postpones her cruise and begs my mother
for a loan to keep her son from jail. Her boy 
              lost his father, but so did my mom and
so did our neighbor. “He’s my son,” she pleads
              as if we’ve all forgotten this. My mother sees 
what we all see. You must burn a control line
              to keep the fire from spreading, to preserve 
the closest homes. Sometimes all you can do
              is evacuate and document the carroty flare 
pooling across the horizon, a blurry median
              so far away you can’t tell if it’s fire 
or sky, but does it matter when the storm
              stays over there? It’s hard to understand 
how air can move so fast and hurt so big.
              Even the experts never know what weather’s coming, 
how much or when, as that boy failed to see
              the car, our neighbor still a boy himself 
behind the wheel that veered onto the lawn
              to make him man and murderer in one fast crash.
In decades since, our neighbor’s given so much back. 
              Not a boy, but Jesus! Only God can do that.
Our neighbor wheels our trash from the curb
              to the bush beside our house each Friday.
He shovels our walk while the snow falls steady
              upon his back. He might have done these things 
if he had not killed a boy, but sometimes
              all we see takes the nearest shape of sorrow, 
a shadow of what is not there, a boy who would be
              a man now, perhaps with a son of his own.
What would he teach that boy? What should my mother
              tell her friend to help her son? Perhaps she could say, 
“You can’t fight fire with fire.” Except, you can.
              Sometimes that is the only way to end the blaze.

Read more from Issue 18.1.