Fever
Amy Durant
I. It is something that happens, sometimes:
a person will go up in flames. They burn
at about 3,000 degrees. This is hotter
than a crematorium. Things are sometimes
left behind: an arm, a foot, the head.
Investigators often blame smoking,
drinking, suicidal tendencies.
Nothing around this person is burned.
Their clothing doesn't burn. The carpet
remains pristine.
The fires are internal in origin.
There are few survivors. The ones that
do live to tell say they remember nothing.
They remember talking to a friend,
perhaps, then a dark hot void,
finally waking up in the hospital
as empty as a husk, burned black, hands
curled, faces melted into masks.
II. When they find me, please tell them
I've always burned hot, even in the
coldest winter. If this were a fairy tale,
I would have swallowed a cinder as a child,
a burning needle, a firefly. Believe me,
I have swallowed none of these things, yet still
I burn, I glow, a banked potbelly stove.
They will find perhaps a foot, a finger,
the curve of an ear. My clothes will still
be plump with my shape. They will blame
suicide, smoking.
They will not think to blame you.
This fire will be internal in origin:
my eyes will go first, burning blue,
twin pilot lights. It will slowly burn through
each memory of you, back to the beginning,
the genesis of this yearning. I will embrace
the fire like a lover come home
from a long journey. I will take it to bed.
There will be no afterwards in which
to remember nothing.
A finger, a foot, the curve
of an ear. These are left behind for you
as curios of a forgotten time in which
I loved you at temperatures
beyond all that is rational.
