burn collector, and elegy

Burn Collector

elegy for Devon Risley




I've been asked to write a poem about food and I think:

Blackbean burgers. Devon. The desert.

I think: That first night, dancing around the kitchen

to Billy Idol, realizing over pots of beans

and fried vegetables and mush that we are doomed

to a sad, inevitable friendship. The kind that starts

and ends in the same place, with the same existential

mantra, the same cheap, sustaining food. The kind

that chokes on a gunshot hallucination

with my feet quaking in a kitchen

in some city 3,000 miles away

like a fisherman feeling a coming tsunami.



I'm supposed to write about food and I think:

can they make liquid smoke out of any smoke?

Throw a bag over to catch, condense,

would they filter a soul out of gunsmoke

and soldered skin before bottling? I pour anyway.

The vegetables pop and sizzle in the heat.

I can sense their sticking in the pan but my hands

are filmed with bean paste and tonight

I am cooking alone.



This is the loss I never prepare for—

three a.m. in a kitchen in Pittsburgh, liquid smoke

spilt on the table, Devon evaporated somewhere

I can't taste, and I just wish there was another

set of hands to scrape the vegetables, patty

the burgers, fry and stack.



I can't think about food. The burgers

aren't spiced right when I make them alone,

some vital hot is gone. The roasting

green chilis turning and crisping in a nearby

parking lot, flavoring the early autumn air

cannot be replaced by some bottle,

some synthetic effigy. I leave the mess

on the table and pull a chair for it to drip onto.



I think: I'm losing my mind. Devon and I

sat for hours that first night, this last one,

two drippy messes sitting at a table eating burgers,

writing poetry. And one of us is thinking too much

and the other isn't doing enough.