"Apple Fire," reading at Manhattan Beach, poem & accompanying video of Apple Fire from August 5, 2020

The mountains’ scale is lost

to land gone to billows

behind the Cabazon dinosaurs,

history says, again

this year, be

ready,

any moment can be

brilliant, set ablaze,

hot enough

to skip elements, could

take us,

us, mostly water

standing beneath

slow bodies

of ash

like an island’s

first breaching, peaks

at a churn,

crumbling over

with a low crackle

at a distance

that might

be safe,

still,

I wear a mask,

never having seen

anything

take up this much space, then

keep growing,

expanding with what

we can be:

dust above

a crown of bones

on organs

gone crisp,

charred thorns

circling a heart

spouting smoke

under a sun

almost hidden

by land razed

underneath,

the damage coming

only by estimate,

we can’t

count fast enough

with how big

this fire

has gotten,

gets, keeps

getting.