The shatter-crash
February Poetry Adventure, Day 26. Prompt: "campfire."
The FPA is hosted yearly by Petra Hernandez of Petra Glyphs. She provides a one-word prompt each day and everyone is invited to write along for the month of February. It’s such a pleasure to try to draw out a poem from each prompt.
I had to stretch a little to fit “campfire” into this one, which is a prose poem about a moment I had earlier today. I do have plenty of legitimate campfire memories, but none of them were sparking for me.
On Thursdays, I drop my younger kids at school and go thrifting for a couple hours. It’s my little treat each week. I‘m at my favorite store, flipping through musty record albums, fingertips gray with dust. I hear a crash, a shatter-crash, the sound of something large and fragile breaking. I turn and look. Everyone looks. I hear a wordless shout, an employee yelling. Every head in the store is pointed to where it’s happening. A man is led out by the manager. I walk to the back of the store to hide in the book section to wait it out, whatever it is. It feels bigger than broken glass. Then, like the shatter-crash burst a bubble of silence around the horror we’re wading through each day, I hear a woman in the middle of the store saying, “Epstein…They’re erasing files…Epstein, Epstein…they should all go to jail.” Her voice is loud. Someone replies to her with a comment about I.C.E. It’s all fractured from this far away. Closer to me, I hear a man snap, “Maybe you should leave then! Maybe you should leave then!” and then he walks away, yelling over his shoulder: “You all have TDS! You have no idea what’s good for you!” A customer browsing near me whispers, “Is there a full moon or something?” My head swirls and I rest my hands on the shelf, whispering to myself. I feel like I can’t catch my breath, like someone lit a campfire in the middle of the store and I took in a lungful of smoke as it coiled from the wood. I’m dizzy and tired, dizzy and tired. I don’t know how to live in this world.
So true, so scary, so sad.
Yet they are the ones saying everyone else is diseased. I think that's called projection. These are trying times, indeed!