Eight Months After the Wildfire

“The Spring Fire burning in southern Colorado is now the third-largest fire the state has ever seen… estimated at slightly more than 94,000 acres.”
-Denver 7 ABC report, July 2018

A deep-voiced rainfall

river rolls up pasture like

a tongue on a reed,

playing past our white

headgates and over the marsh

where we’d put a box

of thistle-eating

flies. It pulls along opaque,

chocolate-dark ashes,

ten thousand parts per

million. Every crawfish, 

trout, and minnow—gone.

Look at their bones lined

up, like bleached natural keys.

The waterbirds fly

south to the desert:

when the rain finally came, 

it just carried death.