Wildfire

by Jonathan Endurance

I put a knife to the cord that leads to silence,
which means my tongue’s got a wildfire for a name.

In this room, I am mourning your loss, so I bit
the flesh of an apple the way a knife begins a war. 

Somewhere, I watch an eagle snatch a chick from 
its mother. I imagine the earth as brutal as a claw. 

I imagine its jaw cracking open like a door
to swallow you whole.

In this coffin, your body is an ellipsis, a hyphen
arrowing into beyond.

In the pages of this poem, I am gathering 
the shards of your memory bit by bit. See it this way:

A hand crowning grief with a name. Which means
I bestow upon it a body for identity. So when I say Pa, 

the body of these words sashays in this page, 
as if to say here I am, come get me.

Here are my palms filled with blood. Because the body
could be anything it wants, I bury my face into them, 

let them drown me like a stillborn. On the hospital bed, 
I mistook your breath for a whirlwind. When you said

son, come sit by my side, let me feel the warmth
of your palms. There is no death as brutal as silence

how it holds me by my hand and walk me into 
a country of grief. It reminds me that a body can also 

be a sinking ship, a knife sharpened only by cutting. 

---

Jonathan Endurance holds a B.A. in English and Literature. His unpublished poem “Ashes” won the UNESCO Sponsored Prize for the 14th edition of Castello di Duino Poetry Competition, ITALY (2018). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Into the Void (We Are Antifa Anthology), Up the Staircase Quarterly, FIVE:2:ONE, and elsewhere.