The Ballad of a Burning Family Tree

Every arsonist sleeps with her

father’s wine-stained kisses

tucked underneath her pillow,

dreams of fire as a foil

to his wide, watered-down eyes, which are

always wanting in passion

but needing in vivacity.

The arsonist wonders how hard

her father’s liquor has to be

to draw blood;

the intoxicating Red has never looked so friendly

yet so menacing, reaped

from the same vice.

Her father,

a broken,

crooked man,

constantly guzzles down shards of glass

because he’s afraid of what he might say

the moment his ripped throat stops

bleeding.

His 2 AM thoughts consist of

worries that his little arsonist

may be flammable,

though she’s been

drowning in a year’s worth of tears

and suffocating though yesterday’s ashes.

Within her 2 AM thoughts,

she has renamed Juliet’s woes:

timeless curiosities,

useless frivolities.

She wonders:

if she holds a drunkard’s chest to her ear,

will she hear a heartbeat or a timebomb,

the echo of a memory or

the suppressed voices

of an abandoned mortality?

On his cheek, are those

scars or tear streaks?

She knows that, if anything,

her father is the

imprint

of a fake wedding ring,

a watch wrapped around her

wrist

that’s no longer ticking,

but that doesn’t stop her

from wearing it all the same.