monomania

It's cold away from the hearth and unceremonious

graduating in winter after four months of tending

(hyper)vigilantly to the hungry fire of career academia,

finger painting with the soot, bucketing the swept ash

of poesy. Behind the wrought iron, my long-serving

cherry wood crepitates into a semblance of resolution.

/

Relief, my regalia, the smoke that sticks to my clothes.

I still hold my hands over the coals, missing that singular,

intermediary warmth. I long to pull down my splayed ribcage

and push in my vertebrae, as if being compressed twofold

could, blessingly, bring me into alignment. "You've never

looked more Masterful," he laureled me at the crossroads.

/

I've learned the craft of stamina, of stockpiling, but seldom

stopped to hark upon the blue pockets of the controlled

blaze I whetted - how it conjures the near-dark of 4 pm

before-solstice blue, stark as the scalloped piping on a

baby shower cake, and tender as blowing on a scraped

knee. No-other-alternative blue, a bleeding ink checklist.