...Byron Landry Byron Landry Daddy Hid Fire You ever steal smokes from your daddy. The boy’s hair was sun- blond, brown at the roots. My daddy doesn’t smoke —​the brown- haired boy’s eyes were small in the light. He remembered the box of matches that burned and burned. One big liquid...

... out of the earth. Beneath her loud, Cypriot screams,            she mutters quietly the grief of her life. The wind-broken hip reminds 1974, when they didn’t want the fire in their village, unless it burned through the hunger                     or the cold. When she left north, the village...

... field mouse, caught in the fence’s clasp, won’t fly to the brutal north that my mother watches over, waiting to disappear. Perhaps, they too fear the suck of a plane’s propellers. But my daughter is fire, not air. Not water. An element to be feared. I can drag...

...Anhvu Buchanan © 2010 by Virginia Tech 2010 Anhvu Buchanan Twelve Ways to Look at a Pyromaniac I. there is a man in a room who stays in my head when I am awake and disappears when I sleep and when he says “psssst” I have to set a fire. II. the candle flickers as we wait...

... canyon cottage with pinecone lawn, shadow-splotched, greenlit. All we ask is movie sex, waxmelt, math problem, bubbling highway —​this heat. Umbrella my plants, these terra cotta plans, your windscattered genius —​ it is fire hazard, feast, the long flight home...

...Lindsay Wilson © 2013 Lindsay Wilson 2013 Lindsay Wilson Black-Footed Country I proposed fire as another form of growth the morning we woke to find the field of sage and creosote replaced by wind-stoked smoke and burning bushes. My mother had recently passed...

...Peggy Smith Duke © 2007 the minnesota review 2007 17 Peggy Smith Duke Strike Four months on strike and the company brings out the A-team. Burly jocks in blue security uniforms fire up chain saws, cut...

...Stevie Edwards © 2017 Stevie Edwards 2017 Stevie Edwards What I Left An old oak dresser bought on consignment I couldn’t squeeze into the moving van. A liberal man from Alabama firing slurs into the dizzy heart of the house, not because he’s racist or has a...

... game, do you look into your lover’s eyes and see a trophy? Pygmy trackers make you feel big, malarial swamps alive, and dung beetles like danger awaits. When the scent of mopone log fires fades and exotic heads in your home feel familiar, does your woman’s thong...

... scribbles in the dirt at his son’s little league games, in the margins of his ATM receipts. At the Super Target over by the frozen pizzas, I found a little poem written on a discarded match- stick. It was a nice poem about fire, the dirt of our lives...

... used to being in the front seat bite marks on the steering wheel why was she upset when her tampon is behind her ear she can’t find her pencil fired from her job why did the blonde fail call the welfare office jump off a bridge drive into...

... fourteen dollars at the flea market in Carlisle but it won’t fire. And a bear that won’t eat at the state fair. Love without blossom everywhere. Some man has fallen in the mud and the history of that is clear. Raised up to one arm fell again. Raised his head to see how...

... into a raging conflagration, only in small scale. It took weeks for them to identify the source of purple streaks on my neck, variety of the burn on your tailbone. It wasn’t from fire. Everything still fit. The night janitor was the first to notice the bundle in my...

... scavenging the depths with nets for the same forgiveness. Everywhere the same wild grasses sway like tiny houses on fire. minnesota review 93 (2019) DOI 10.1215/00265667-7737003 © 2019 John Sibley Williams 13 Copyright © 2019 John Sibley Williams 2019 ...

...Sean Lause Lynndie England is the daughter we always wanted I saw her once down on Summit Street setting stoplights on fire. Don't get me wrong— If I saw her now I'd probably level her But you don't know her in her secret veins and I do. It wasn't orders...

... you held my face over the gas stove; a single hair escaped from my ponytail and fell to the fire. How the flame devoured it like a fuse, chewing its way up my scalp. But it did not explode. Instead, it touched the others, and my head...

... had no contact with the outside world until 1978. Last night I dreamed that fire flew down from the east and when I woke the sun was lighting the snow aflame. After living alone for so long, the sky became another prophet, the snow another burning bush. Soon the...

... washing the dishes when the sky darkened, when gunshots claimed the silence that swallowed the streets. My mother remembers her sister’s grave, her brother’s tomb, her uncle’s fallen house in iraq, grenades plundering their farmland, fire raging like thunder. My father...

...,       snickering red welts. She burns       the edges. Nothing exists unless you write it, her quick hands a cool fog       lifting over the bowl. Brings       him to a sear, simmered cold       inside, shreds him with the grater, piece by piece, scalds him black in her fire...

... of her headstone? an aunt said, her face pinched belligerently watching as the babies crayon the afternoon. The phone rings with something important to say. A fire started, feeding on leftover-Fall. Grandpa in the basement Germany mapped out in the brown...