Pyrolatry

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    ladybug, your house is on fire. do you remember

when it began, when the brackish ponds of your youth

gave way to deserts turned over for their take-all-comers

attitude? might have been a moment you didn’t expect

    on that trip down to vegas. stopped for coffee in tonopah,

you were standing outside the mini mart when far-off tongues

of sunlight began to remind the red hills of old orgasms.

those slopes usually seem so sexless, so over the concepts

    of penetration and stripping, but as you watched the sun

lick the landscape together, you forgot the reason

for that journey south. now you forget even more

often, the candied sparkle of your mind dulled

    by wildfires and the unsettling intrusion of accidents

into your daily rituals. what should it take to wake up

in America? at what point will it no longer be possible

to worship at the pyre of self-preservation? it’s become

    harder, yes, to swallow these day-to-day reinventions

of yourself. but if this kind dreadful burn began with you,

it makes sense to see it through to darkness, yes? to let go

of what’s bound to memory. to eat your larvae one by one.