We slept outside, above the boars in the night, for a ribbon of breeze. Each day ached from its burning, valley alight from the hunters charring their own land so no one else could hunt on it. We fed the stray cat daal in the predawn. A hot air balloon hovered above the pink-lined hills. We gathered crumbs on the bottoms of our soft feet. I pulled hay from your bangs. You brought the wet towel to my opened knee. I told someone the missing was impossible to stand—I stood it. We did not ask god about the wildfires, the wind whipping them alive. We saw ourselves from the inside out, briefly, like a sun-flushed prism—our sorrow, our hungry impossibility. We made things complicated, over-jeweled. We were romantics. We brought the heel of our hands into a mosquito’s barely-there body. We tried to keep our blood on the inside, mistaking it as ours to keep. We watched the flames lick the bottom of each mushroom cloud, asking the wind to go to sleep, to please go back to sleep.
–
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of the inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize from Cordella Press.