Coleman Farm

I used to write stories where two people burned at the end. 

In these stories two people were in love and wore old leather, 

smelled something like metal and oil, and pulled a red wagon 

containing incendiaries they would throw at houses and 

at the end the two would burn. The last time I drove past 

Coleman Farm I saw the bulldozed pasture freckled 

with eleven homes in the style of the new New England 

colonial, and the mountain of gravel beginning to bloom 

beside the street sign labeled “Monarch Place.” That day I noticed 

a playground set behind “The Montgomery” so in this story

the female remembers the grazing bulls and sees herself 

in the house making crêpes suzettes on Sunday mornings. 

I used to write stories where two people burned at the end 

but recently I heard that when an atom bomb is detonated 

everything within five hundred square kilometers that is able to burn 

begins burning (i.e. plastic, wood, skin). This part is called the “thermal pulse” and

it says what I wanted to when I killed those two kids. I also heard 

the earth will ripple like water and the rain will be black so 

in this story the bomb is detonated. Because bodies and homes

when evaporated don’t glow hieroglyphic or paint a copper landscape, 

I won’t use the word “sanguine,” but at the end of this story there's a moment

after that tsunami of light and before the shockwave, a moment of blindness 

that looks like “us” and “them,” in which two people reach for the other's hand.