Photo by Arto Marttinen on Unsplash
I spend a lot of time thinking about when I am water,
and knowing when I am not.
If storms are tumult—so much more than
cataclysmic, every one,
even the soft rain in sun showers
that washes dust rings onto windows.
When the air is finally opened—
and the heat that pours is not a kind of rain,
I can’t breathe so deeply
when I find the air is ash
—that pours falls
and cools
and the wind rushes
away.
When they ask me how I’m feeling, I say very quietly
—I think I’m burning—
not the quick eat of fire, or the quake of a sun,
more like the slow crawl of magma through a farm field.
Sometimes,
I mistake myself for water.
Rushing, cold, and never afraid— but maybe
starving for land.
mountains are not stable
and my body
alchemic, electric, I do not recognize
Any part of me.
but did you see the cloud? they ask.
spring of not-water,
but lightning.
Pyrocumulus piled so high, so luminous,
there was no mistaking
the heat.
Kristian Macaron resides in Albuquerque, NM, a land full of treasures. Her poetry chapbook collection is titled, Storm. Other prose and poetry publications can be found in Medusa’s Laugh Press, The Mantle Poetry, Luna Luna Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, Rust + Moth, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, and others. She is a co-founding editor of the literary journal, Manzano Mountain Review. View her work at Kristianmacaron.com