The curb remembers.
Smoke curls upward like sound spilling from the mouth of someone who once resembled a boy sharpened by rage. He offers a cigarette, his fingers burned black, his teeth clenched as they are turned to ash.
There is no holding what burns itself to be held.
Fire eats through fingers, burns slow, deliberate, silent watchers gathering the spirals like language, like proof of something vanishing. Fire touches everything, and some hands are meant to fail – kindness a soft rot that begins in the bones and smells like his mother’s skin.
He bleeds in colorless threads, marking the pavement, the memory. He wants to be ash. Wants to erase himself fingerprint by fingerprint, burning down to the absence that seeps in through the chill of the air. Later, there is only this: the ritual repeats.
Smoking.
Watching.
The spirals of smoke rising again from his tongue, delicate and damned. No one speaks. The silence is full of teeth.
a root splints open,
bleeds flame into the river –
insects flee through the birch.
About the Author
Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and teaches in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from the University of Texas – El Paso and also holds a doctorate in educational leadership. Some of her favorite recent publications are in Sussurus, Bi Women Quarterly, and narrated on the Midwest Weird podcast. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review.
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