To My Tangled Flame

This is to the flame my mother ignited in the shell of her abdomen, coaxing it from double X’s. She set it between the whiteness of growing rib, the

shadowed alcoves of my heart;

to the doctors tucking it into the folds of soft skin with white downy, laced at the edges.

It is desired for all to flare brighter in the candy-bright thread called Age,

the currency of dreams and memory,

only to discover the melted wick at its final passing–

the reality of this usually being the flame rages early and shivers to a stub soon after.

And the people–

the people fall apart, usually, too, unraveling in monotonous lines.

I’ve never walked the straightest line,

those with flames pulsing the stuff of desirous life.

It gleams cleanly in bared bone teeth and benignity.

Hotly, brightly.

In the past I used mirrors to know its shape, its color, and I found I was sorely mistaken–

no one told me flames had the fates to shape-shift.

Cold as a star in moments of anger,

soft and yellow and reliable in benevolence,

tapered thin, high, with eagerness; flushed red.

When I danced, it maintained an inexorable sway;

writing left it fat, hungry, dragging against its confines.

It chewed happily, noisily on small printed words,

glowed with the praise of good grades.

Turned scarlet and quiet in the presence of boys.

My flame learned it no longer had need for the reflective qualities of mirrors, no need

for the smallness of the cozy home it kept inside me;

it buried the shadows into storage boxes.

It squeezed, shifted, huddling closer to skin so it might see out too.

He said he saw it when I first looked at him, smoldering the blue to the palest grey.

It burns red into my cheeks, leaves the paper of my skin dry and blazing,

ready as kindling.

My flame scatters sparks in our passion.

I have never known such brightness.

And I have never known such ash, the taste of charring.

It flakes away when my hands now touch a keyboard,

stands still and unfeeling when words try to appear.

It quakes in the presence of sadness, despair, failure.

In loss, it is all but that stub, that melted wick, and it drags the shadows from their boxes.

It flares, subsides;

smokeless, phantom.

This is to my tangled flame, dragging its feet against the sharp edges of adulthood.

Tangled in its own happiness, and tangled in mistakes.

Birthed from a strong will to love, bright in the memories of innocence,

shivering in the draft of decision, flickering fiercely still.

Always, I hope.