Diary Entry 451

Today, my husband bought a lighter.

I’m scared of fire. He told me to flick it

but it was warm to the touch. “Will it burn

me?” I asked, and he shook his head no.

The flame licked the lid, blue, and when I

went to close it, air of butane, I saw an atom

split and believed it possible a mere lighter lid

could not squelch such a blaze. “Just close it?”

I hesitated, and he nodded again. And it did, and

I am fine, and the fire can roll out from my husband’s

thumb once, twice, ten times, and even his thigh, zing!

and honestly, everything is fine. It’s only that now, I can

imagine coincidences where the fire risk warning

comes the day he buys a lighter, and it’s so dry

that even my oiled skin is peeling and tight,

and of course there’s no such thing as coincidence,

so why on earth would he buy a lighter today,

of all days and not expect me to worry about smoke?

The smoke alarm was chirping just last week,

and I broke off a piece that held it to the wall,

and I shut it up but I didn’t change the battery.

I believe myself to be overreacting. Noticing

is one thing. I am overnoticing. I am fine,

of course. And the smoke alarm is back on the wall

and it hasn’t chirped again. Sometimes, the little things

don’t matter. I guess. Two nights ago, we shopped

for a portable gas burner, only sixty bucks and then

we started seeing them everywhere, in every cooking video

on YouTube, and now it’s a pattern and patterns

are the stuff of poetry, the bones of what this has become,

straw beneath the pyramidal beginning of a campfire.

Or else, smoke is just a cloud that will bring rain. But

the wind is up. A week ago, we sat around a near-stranger’s fire,

wood burning across from a winter-bone hill, a paper plate

fanning the flames like the boldest squirrel to cross the street,

and now I sense poetry between Saturday and Thursday.

A fire risk warning on the heels of two high-wind evenings.

Sure, rain came quick as a blink, but it did nothing to stop

the imminence. Tonight, I’ll sit on the same spot on the sectional

and imagine I can smell something burning,

like I did on Sunday when we ran to check the space heater.

Of course, all was well and I was fine, except now

I’m seeing poetry through power outages and grounded

airplanes, highway signs and Nextdoor posts. But this

is an articulated skeleton now, this poem, and so maybe

it’s as simple as calling out the bluff of patterns, like

Colorado weather reporters, and I will not wake up dead.

How I love simplicity dressed up like an atom bomb.

I can be a hero, perhaps, by my secret sixth sense,

because I can sense poetry, you see., but I cannot write it.

This is just a diary entry, a blue flame licking the lid of chaos,

a split second

before it dies.