Burn Barrel by Todd Davis

A girl is throwing trash at the flames.
Anything that will burn. Plastic milk jugs,
cardboard boxes, the electric panels
of broken toys and the needled syringes
her mother uses to shoot insulin
into her thighs. The fire smolders, gray-
to-black-to-purple, mutating into a green
plume like the peacock feather she bought
when her class took a trip to the zoo.
She slips a caramel between her lips, stolen
from her grandmother’s pink candy dish.
She watches snow fall and the wind blow
across the mouth of the barrel, whistling
smoke into a field of corn-stubble, shading
a trail to the edge of the woods where each day
it grows dark a little earlier. She hears
the snowplow on the county road, sees sparks
as the blade strikes asphalt. When her stick
stirs what’s left of the flames, she feels
the sugar in her body rise against the barrel
that warms her. She feeds the fire
that melts the sky.
—Todd Davis

Originally published in Winterkill (Michigan State University Press, 2016)