Today's poem is by Jessica Tanck

So Below
       

I can walk through fire, I told my mother, drunk
on the glow of sparklers, on sand cooling
in the sunset. I might have been five or six
years old, inflated with the recklessness
and certainty that come from living
in one's imagination. Architect of sandcastles,
tender of flame, I paraded the beach in orange
swimsuit and water shoes, ready for thrill.
There was everything, here: fire and the great
water breathing, moving, cold that stretched
all the way to the horizon. And I felt it,
that bigness. Pictured the sand crumbling
into cakes of earth and rock below us,
how deep the world stretched on every side.
My sister and I, sparklers in hands,
zagged into evening like fireflies or bats,
weightless, moved by joy. And my grandparents
were inside, and my mother and father here
on the beach, and what wasn't protecting
me, what wasn't stretching above, what
didn't comfort me in my smallness? I can
walk through fire, I told her, and believed it.
Stood at the threshold of glow. Having never
felt the suck and sear of it, having never nursed
a burnt knuckle under cold water or whimpered
for relief from a tongue of flame beneath my skin.
I can walk through fire, I said, and my mother sat
still in her seat. Eyes locked in the flames, she said, No.
You can't. Didn't even look up, did not look at me.

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Copyright © 2024 Jessica Tanck All rights reserved
from Beloit Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission