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{ashes from olean} maxwell despard It wasn't so much an old flame as a matchstick never lit. There's a picture of us posed with it in front of an oak tree, freshly planted in the yard of her parent's two-story Root Street home. One of those accidental clicks of genius that captures a summer's worth of context in a single frame. Captures what should have been our first kiss, skipped for ghosts in the curtains of my grandmother's house next door. Skipped for face-bound footballs in the park around the corner. But ten bruise-silent years later, we were too sexy to care about old arguments, or incarcerated husbands. The sulphur sparked slow with a phone call, simmered through a lake in Bradford, half a joint in the lungs, dinner at Perkin's. Simmered through impressionist clouds, half a joint in the belly thirty feet from the police. It cooked for nine hours in our Crock Pot guts and flared into the empty space of dusk’s wake over the Allegheny Valley. A trail of smoke followed us to the nearest motel lobby, round the back, and up the stairs to room 209 where our clothes burned off completely. Green and purple flames thrashed on the couch, the television exploded, and we coalesced as the wings of a glistening phoenix. We took flight from the charred remains of the mattress to our oak’s highest bough, scattered the last flickers of 1995 into the sunrise over downtown, and crumbled into ashes bound on opposite gusts. |
