by Francine Witte
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| As the Bootleg fire in Southern Oregon rages on, the massive wildfire is creating its own weather systems. "The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it's changing the weather. Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do," Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the state forestry department, told The New York Times. —EcoWatch. Photo: A pyrocumulus cloud from the Bootleg Fire drifts into the air near Bly, Oregon on July 16, 2021. PAYTON BRUNI / AFP via Getty Images via EcoWatch. |
Smokedrift and sunblot
from the fire spreading
like deathpain, the heat
so hot it spins the wind,
pinches lightning out
of the sky. Used to be
the wind would tell
the fire where to go.
Here in the east, we watch
the fire on TV. The silhouettes
of houses falling cardlike,
the bare hands of trees reaching up
in useless prayer. The weatherman
tells us the clouds we see
in the New York sky aren’t clouds
but smoke from out west.
It makes me think of other weathers,
the ones that weren’t weathers,
the storm of my father leaving so fast
the windows quaked, and then, the quiver
of hospitals filling up again, the rain
in the eyes of the left-behind.
The quiet drought of a man,
somewhere, shaking his head
sending the word “hoax” into the
air like a butterfly.
Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press), The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction), and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books). Her chapbook The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ in Fall 2021. She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in NYC.
