We lived in a housing project behind the buzz and hum of a factory
with forever-churning steam and orange sodium lights
glowing like embers. When darkness fell
it dropped hard, never enough deadbolts
to keep us safe.

Summer came, and with it shimmery-jacketed beetles
crowding the porchlight. They kept us awake,
telling stories of where they’d been. On the back porch
with my parents, I stood in the June evening
and watched the burn.

It was a house up the street, consumed with flames
licking the chimney. Hungry, relentless, eager.
Sirens ripped the air apart,
ash was already falling like confetti on our heads. 
An omen.

The air was greasy, slick with kerosene. It smelled like
the past and the future, like something I knew.
I bowed my neck, dipped my head like a bird
to rest a cheek against my mother’s palm.
This is the beginning, I thought.