James King

In Light of Recent Fires

We will turn out the lights.
We will be afraid of the light.
Any poet who describes their “burning passion”
will be ushered out of the room.
We will call our lovers “dim”
and mean it sweetly, and they
will be most beautiful
when we cannot see them,
when their flesh is tepid,
when their hands are wet and cold,
blankets like enfolding earth.
The schools will teach this evolution
and no other. We will learn
multiplicity of hearts,
as the worms did all those years ago,
breathing and being the breath
of the black soil. Come to me,
sightless. You and I will be myriad
in our slitherings, and eventually
the blackened trees,
spurned by the somethings we have done,
will spread new roots.
Let’s leave the sun,
which is also a burning, to them.
No, when the blue current runs through
the neighborhood at night, the time
the lovers of the future choose
to be awake, alive in the new manner,
feed me, little wriggle of me,
wedges of clementines—
their rinds the last flames we know.

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James King is a poet from New Hampshire, transplanted to the Carolinas. His work has appeared in Bear Review, Exposition Review, Chautauqua, Anti-Heroin Chic and others. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he is an MFA candidate in poetry and a coordinator for the UNCW Young Writers Workshop. He can be found on Instagram @jamn_king.