wildscape. literary journal

Fire Downstream
by Sara Fitzpatrick

I dreamed I was sleeping, so I know
I was. Next to me you breathed, so I know
you were. The one I left, he seethes, his gift
to us, the reason. What atrocity now attends
the world that I should have stayed? An Olympian
drama in such small lives. His seething big
as any sea—what village for his tidal wave?

My fault small and not tectonic, but next to me
you breathe, my new religion. Alms in a jar
unearned peace. For now it soothes the world.
It feeds, and we build a house around it, grow
flowers for an altar we haven’t made, make gods
out of mud as soon as it rains, dress our bodies
in earth the way it’s always belonged to us, how
it’s waited to be slapped naked into an oven
for tomorrow’s bread. Call it horno, a destiny
of desert. We cultivate what we can out of what
we find, furnace to stave off tsunami, seeds
of a wind called Elsewhere. 

about the author // Sara Fitzpatrick