The sun more dazzling since
the flood that put the fire down.
Thick shiny scales of charred wood
weighted with light and its secrets,
like the surface of water.
The bread of the neighborhood--
this nose bouquet, an acrid wet
our windows can’t keep out. We are
a bakery with its ovens set on burn.
No one can get over this new object,
the hard art that flame has made of
a house of humans who, it’s said,
couldn’t scream as loud as a siren.
The likeliest rumor goes
that they got out alive.
Laurinda Lind, a caregiver (and former journalist and college English instructor), lives in New York’s North Country, near Canada. Poems are in Atlanta Review, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway. She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner and a finalist for Patricia Dobler and Joy Bale Boon poetry awards.