Helpmate
She
stretched and asked me to hold out my hand;
extinguishing a cigarette in it, she sniffed the air and said
“there's a fire afield,” which alarmed me, but she
wouldn't say where and I couldn't stop it anyway—to show
me she closed her fingers in my hair and shook until my turkey
neck went wobbling, all the while her hissing whispers,
“consuming children. Consuming barns and trapped animals.
Consuming the new paint, consuming the soft of the land,
drying it, searing it hard and shut.” She was crying and
I
got motion sick; it was a noise I had long heard as distant,
and its new nearness brought vertigo. Now she could beat me without
any pretense and spit out my word, my “useless” and
finally
I could see the wildfire strike, the wheat made torches.
-Nick Admussen
About the Author
Nick Admussen’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Seneca Review, and Pebble Lake Review. He is a graduate student in East Asian studies at Princeton University.
