Fireproof
Michael Turle
I have traipsed in robes of jade through
azure gardens — round the spines of
ancient lovers, muses’ children who
breathe with eyes I cannot know.
I can but imagine how bright their fires, the warmths they held inside their hearts
and how the love must have consumed them, an inferno of yearning, paradisio of
trust and tongues and hands and understanding—THAT is what love must be.
Paradise seems to have locks, and keys and there is snow on the
ground and icicles on the gates, and sometimes if I get close enough,
I feel the flamelash on my skin, feel all the pain of being burned
without the joy of being fuel, of burning with a purpose in mind.
In azure gardens in robes of jade amidst the
dead who have known love and breathe its
flames up through their bones
I sit and shiver once in solace, in soulless, in soma, in solitude.
And I wonder if I’ve missed something, some class I
skipped taught in the womb just before we all move
on to bigger and colder things:
“This is how to love someone,” the
amniotic fluid writes in chalk upon the
uterine wall and everyone else took
notes; “This is how to lose yourself in
passions and kisses and twirling of hair
and this is how to get all that instead of
eulogizing love at 1 AM in your notes
app.”
I have traipsed in robes of jade through
lovers’ gardens of poesy and read their
breaths, their gasps for air in the Elysian
inferno that love seems to be. And I
have stood in soft snow drifts pissing
over borrowed boots and I have never
felt that way and I do not know if I
will—and I redo my fly and I stare at the
snow, and I scream softly unto it, “there
must be more than this!”
and the snow gives no answer
and I go back inside.
And I think that I am fireproof,
immune to love’s incineration,
scorched and scalded by its heat but
never turned to ash; and I have seen
the paper people burn away in
ecstasy, and I have longed to join
with them, to have a heart of
gasoline and be my own love’s
effigy— to burn with them myself.
I must be the bastard son of some frail
phoenix, of some dragon stoned: I’ve
asbestos wings but a matchbox heart that
cannot burn, that will not burn no matter how
fiery it ought to— salamandrine feathers,
adamantine bones in a world of pitch and
napalm, in a world of fire and love.
I have traipsed in robes of jade through
azure gardens ablaze with truth. My
heart longs to incinerate—my soul
remains yet fireproof.
Michael Turle is an English major at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. He was the 2020 recipient of the Arthur E. DuBois Award for Excellence in Literary Criticism and works as an editor at KSU’s Literature and Arts Magazine, Luna Negra. He plays trumpet in the athletic bands and serves as the media director of Sigma Tau Delta, Xi Mu chapter.
