Margaret Elysia Garcia

Some Things After

Trace the outline of bright orange in the night sky

Note that this apocalypse

creates its own weather patterns 

Witness the vaporizing of cows and horses

bath tubs and pipes

sacred sites

Wait for the president to declare a national emergency

Examine the fire chasers film of your studio burning

There will be no warning you will log on and see your destruction

Notice the news vans here to

exploit last night’s conflagrations

Inhale the scent of wood paneled walls and asbestos glittered ceilings

Insuffolate both the historic buildings and the singlewide trailers

Listen to your neighbors wail on newscasts

The loss of everything

Hear pundits pontificate that you should not live where you live without offering any solutions

Keep waiting on the president to declare an emergency

Watch the governor land in your debris

Make a statement

Evacuate for six weeks with a plan for one

Review the balances of nearly maxed out credit cards

Put off back to school clothes shopping for your kids

Check your bleating phone again and again while you try to eat the first meal in two days at a diner two towns over

Watch everyone else in the diner do the same

Pay for the firefighters dinner—the state only gives them an apple a granola bar a bottle of water

Let them cut in line at the grocery store thank them always

Scream at the principal who forces the kids whose houses burned to still do fire drills that autumn

Hold the child living in a tent on your lap on the playground while she cries her hamster having died that morning

Run out of money

Drink too much

Hire the lawyer whose own house burned

Exhale when the president finally declares an emergency

Watch the FEMA trucks roll in

Watch as the utility company that started the fire cuts the still living unburnt trees on the side of the road down chipping them

in case of fire

Get up at 4 am instead of 6 am to make sure your kid gets to school on time

Watch as religious groups sift through your ash

Their lord giving you no more than you can handle

Reach for your books that burned in unison you make out their shapes until you touch them the silk of their ash dissipates in your hands

Sooth at the soundbytes of support

Go through the motions 

Try to act normal

Wear the same thing for three days 

Stop talking to people you once admired

Hear the silence of a bird less forest

See starving bears and mountain lions rest in your backyard

Listen to the valedictorian two towns over speak of the annoyance of your town’s fire at graduation your towns graduates and families homeless in the audience 

Tell the desensitized that a million acres burn

Tell them to imagine everything from Sacramento to San Francisco gone

Follow them to the horizon as they move away from you

Acknowledge that trauma is no longer trending in American Literature

Do not make fellow Californians uncomfortable

Silence your self for the sake of decorum 

Slip away into another time or place

Smell the smoke in your dreams

Ambient Music for Fire Survivors

It begins. A tendril of movement, invisible unfurling. 

Look out the airplane window:

high above any fires

you on the wing

the turbines benign 

(except for acceleration of our destruction)

It’s quiet here. The babes lulled, no screaming, no evacuations, no heat.

Look out the airplane window: 

the curl and uncurl 

wafts its way

breathe deep

(there is, of course, a fire somewhere)

Other travelers napping. Playing games on phones. Texting women, not their wives.

Look out the airplane window:

nothing is burning,

not the engine, not a passion

to rise up for anything

(and save ourselves)

The smoke makes it way just to me; swirl into still stunned sinuses:

A low hum rhythm, a dull constant beat without rests.