kicked up charcoal dust from what must have been a car fire next to the road finds my body. with both hands i bend down to rub the carbon into the skin on my legs. roadside fence line gnawed by blaze. some posts are ate up a few feet off the ground, remnants suspended mid air by loops of wire. nearby a beer can sparkles against the black earth, and there’s a halo of deer back bone around my shadow’s head. i missed some char on my ankle, its black covering the tattoo of a house i have there. once i read somewhere i can’t remember; ‘every burning house is a woman’. while i rub that carbon back into mine, i think about the shirt stuck to my back, about the fabric of longing sticking too like the sweat made by fires lit in the summertime.