ALL THAT BURNS

The familiar is lost
to me along with the jackpines
smoldering into ash
and purple pitcher plants threatening
to devour me whole. It tastes
like spring but September
was yesterday and everything
is starved. The leaves
melted into carmine blood,
all day the fire blazed.
All that I burned, I burned
for you and have been burning
since the day you left. The boy
I once was is the boy I am.
My hands sear into my thighs
as I suck breath
from smoke. The tree I climb
is the one I cut. What’s tangible
can’t be touched and for the first time
I’m terrified of having
two hands.

HALF NAKED PRAYERS

I always imagined
my father dying
on a bleak winter night
where the snow droops so heavy
on each branch they
spill onto the ground, like ink
oozing from a pen. The words
spelling, I love you
with all my life. I imagine
his bones becoming so hollow
that not even morphine can keep them
from crumbling to dust. The funeral
attended by people
I met once as a child
who each writhe up to me
to whisper prayers that he
may be in heaven. I’d stay
once people went back to their lives,
to twirl, whimsically throughout
the tombstones, and when the air
no longer has any oxygen
left, to dig, to claw
at frozen ground
with fingertips, where his dust-filled
corpse stirs, as if beneath
these frozen layers of earth
lay a man who knows how
to love me. Because I know,
their prayers are nothing more
than attempts for half naked
hearts to blur into fear,
as if fever.

Matt Baker is a student at Northern Michigan University in Marquette studying ecology and writing. In his free time he enjoys moshing in sweaty basements to live music, surfing in the Great Lakes, and drinking beer. He has work forthcoming in The Greatest City Collective magazine.