“Firebreak” by Kate Polak

Firebreak

The smoke from the Canadian fires
is making my mother’s cough worse —
bad enough as it was with her packs
of Salem Ultra Lights and years
of no health insurance. And worry.
The heat is getting worse. Anyone can

tell. Just read a story about a farmer whose
neighbor had a hay fire raging across
his land, so he drove a tractor, janky
and rickety as a high schooler’s car,
along the path of the conflagration,
made a fire break, saved the crop, saved

whatever animals were in the path, and
of course the humans already mourning
their gone lives.
He died, just beyond
the age I am now, the way he lived:
loading corn. The pathway of love is
between crop and inferno, where both,

given what we’ve been given, must be,
but one consumes the other, and so we cut
dangerous pathways between what is
and might be, though that’s not always
the metaphor you’d think. Flame isn’t all
that consumes. You can feel the patient

boredom on one side: endless rows to sow
and fell, the routine eating years, the busyness
of what must be done, forever putting off,
and the heat on the other: waiting to take you
whole, waiting to melt whatever you were and
leave whatever founders in your wake, new.

Kate Polak

Kate Polak is an artist, writer, and teacher. Her work has recently appeared in Plainsongs, McSweeney’s, So to Speak, Coffin Bell, The Closed Eye Open, Inverted Syntax, and elsewhere. She lives in south Florida with her familiars and aspires to a swamp hermitage. 

Headshot: Ian MacDonald

Photo Credit: Staff