Mia Bell

How the Story Ends

This morning I read in the New York Times
that we should all learn to live with fire.
They mean on account
of the changing climate, of course—600 fires
in the last 3 days alone—but I am thinking
of Doctor Strangelove:
or how I learned
to stop worrying and love you
for the explosion that you are, even if you burn
1,000 acres of me.
          I am drinking from a plastic straw
and warming my hands on the blaze.
I want to be cut
into neat cubes
like an ethically produced block of tofu
and stacked into a pyramid
of order
but your grabbing hands create heaps
      of disarray and I am tumbling,
                                                                  grasping
at pencils. I’m 13
          and I’m trying to flip ahead
to how the story ends,
but the book is long
        and every word is a bruise.
You protract your posture,
head tilted
    at a skeptical 45˚
                           as I hold my red pen
aloft, tearing
through the pages, re-writing
   the ending 600 ways to Sunday,
   and wouldn’t you like to know
what it is. You were always impatient
like that. Even now
as I rip out the pages
       and read them
to your 5˚ eyes, you are cutting me
off, telling me I never
get to the point, but I’m doing it now,
I’m closing the book,
I’m pressing you between pages
599 and 600 like a flower.

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Mia Bell is a poet based in Ithaca, New York. Her poem “Disappearing Act” has been published in Marginalia Review. When she's not writing, she loves going out for long hikes and drinking coffee.