“Everyone keeps saying 'apocalyptic,' but that doesn’t begin to cover it.” —CNN’s Karina Tsui from Pacific Palisades, January 8, 2025
My sister texts me saying she is sorry
to hear about my long disease [sic] and I
think of the long history of fire, how often
our world wants to be held instead of this,
now, how it’s helled. And in the military
they put me in the burn pits, not to help,
but for punishment, no mask given, and
forced to stand there with the ash now
that owns me, apical scarring, and this
is the world now, scaring me, the news
where I see fire in the Ukraine and fire
in Gaza and fire in Sudan and fire in
Myanmar and fire in Haiti and I look
online at a “current large wildfire map”
and it looks as if all of California is on
fire and I worked in California during
COVID, a disaster healthcare volunteer,
going to all the worst-hit cities, raged
by COVID and, always, driving in, I’d
see countless TRUMP signs [sick],
almost as if COVID went wherever his
supporters were, a nurse yelling one
time that the OR needed to have at
least two sets of negative pressure
respirators, and I remember a shift
where all of the staff was sick, how
nobody showed up but me, and, out-
side, the horizon was ablaze, rooms
packed with COVID patients, one
dying every other shift, and I could
go outside for my break, but couldn’t
take my mask off outside either, not
with the planes dropping fire retardant,
and a medic telling me that the UV
in L.A. was deadly, is deadly, and this
doctor screaming something about
a CT scan, and a COVID patient who
came in with no ID (we took him),
and an MP from a nearby military
base who died in his 20s, drowned
in the water of his own lungs, and
how someone came in and a nurse
was asking if the patient couldn’t
breathe because of COVID or be-
cause of the fires and the fires were
COVID and COVID was a fire, is
a fire, and my father is in bed and
he’s flicking through the news and
it’s orange-red on the screen and
red-yellow on the screen and it’s
yellow-orange, all these different
hells we create—bombings and
wildfire and a Republican’s pool
in his mansion backyard drowning
in flames and the fires in Burkina
Faso don’t make our news and
the fires in Cameroon don’t make
our news and the fires in Mali
don’t make our news, but fires
of the wealthy are all over our
screens and the mansions are so
quickly eaten by Hell. My son
googles the words Who invented
fire? and the A.I. answers, Homo
sapiens and we invented all of
this, all of this ash and smoke
and I remember when I was
standing in the middle of my
lungs being destroyed for
the rest of my life and there
was fence all around me and
I thought of incarceration,
how we are getting so good
at war that we are turning our
whole entire world into a prison
and the only way out of this hole
is to stop everything we’re doing.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).
