The South Starts Here
with houses, shacks,
salons, billboards
piles of tyres, an airport hangar,
a Methodist church, a propane tank,
voids, that ramshackle Whispering Pines,
its shuttered shadow;
always something else burning,
forty three fires,
the 44th by a piece of cloth I lit.
with unsellable houses destined to crumble
in an emptying county
with flames spurting from farm outbuildings
– burned wood into crackle.
All I saw was orange in the air,
on unmarked drives veering off
into quiet dead ends
where people share last names
even if they don’t remember
how they share bloodlines.
No traffic off of 13, and deep country roads.
You never run out
of abandoned buildings there.
I had timed it perfectly,
on Valentine’s Day, an arson spree,
I let the hens out first,
too sensible to be caught.
Me, they called stupid, crazy,
close-cut red hair, goatee,
wide blue eyes, good run to bad.
Maggie Mackay, a co-editor at www.wordbohemia.co.uk and a second year student on the MA in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, has work in several publications including Ink, Sweat and Tears, Bare Fiction and The Interpreter’s House, and forthcoming in Obsessed with Pipework.