THE BOOTLEG FIRE IS CREATING ITS OWN WEATHER

by Francine Witte

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.

PRAYER AGAINST HEALING

by Liz Ahl

A satellite view of the Bootleg Fire burning in Oregon last week.Credit: NOAA, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CIRA via The New York Times.

 

While flash floods hurl  

muddy torrents elsewhere, 

this NYC-sized fire lets loose  

its own brand of torrent,  

floods the drought-dried mountains 

with its hungry spill. 

 

I broadcast a cruel variant  

of prayer: that the destruction  

wreaked by the last big fires 

is still stark moonscape enough  

to refuse this newest ravaging;  

 

that the forest hasn’t recovered enough yet, 

that the masochistic cheatgrass  

hasn’t sprung up enough in between  

the skeletal remains of the trees,  

that the Winter Ridge—awful wish!—

might still be more barren wound than healed;  

that it can’t offer enough fuel yet  

to carry such a conflagration further 

or to deliver its blazing deluge all the way 

to the shrinking shores of the lakes 

or, somehow, beyond. 

 

That we won’t have to wait or pray 

for the too-late balm of October rains.  

 

That this ongoing ruin  

might have some use against itself. 

 

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), as well as several chapbooks of poetry. Much of her recent published work was composed or revised during visits to the Playa Artist Residency Program, on the shore of Summer Lake, currently threatened by the Bootleg fire. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.