VA Smith serves as a home chef/caterer, loves on her friends and family, and hones her poetic rhythms walking and biking. She has dropped poetry into dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them Blue Lake Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Mobius, Oyster River Pages, Quartet, The Southern Review, Verdad, Third Wednesday, Tipton Poetry Journal, West Trade Review and forthcoming in Evening Street Review. Her book Biking Through the Stone Age will be published by Kelsay Books in Spring 2022. Currently she’s finishing a collection titled America’s Daughters & Other Poems and ignoring her Peleton. VA lives in her adopted city, Philadelphia, on Lenni Lenape land.

After the Fire

I. The Morning Walk
My dog and I cut
a crooked path,
poke our way past
ladder trucks, police cars,
pale firehoses like jumbo
octopus arms drooping
across the street, curling
into puddles filled with fallen
bare branches
from last night’s storm

II. The News
It’s not until 9 am, settled
home with my coffee and laptop,
his bone, that I pull up
NBC 10 News, January 5, 2022:

13 souls woke screaming
this 6:30 am,
3 mothers and 9 children dead,
a father and his 5-year-old
child injured as they broke
2nd story windows filled with flame
to fall on freezing concrete.

Our mayor proclaims an “immensely dark day,
worst Philly fire in over a century.”
By 10, I wonder if he’s counting
the 1985 MOVE inferno,
when a city SWAT team
firebombed Osage Avenue,
killing 11 “armed and dangerous”
African Americans
Five were babies

III. The Neighbors
By noon, recycling and trash
pickup happen on schedule,
so Next-door Neighbors quiet
their online complaints re:
package theft, dog feces, and litter;
instead, they mourn the dead,
GoFund the living.

At 3 pm, Light of the City
School staff stream rushing
lines of students into noisy,
masked order.
I open my door to watch
parents, neighbors, bus drivers
carry kids home, backpacks
flashing Unicorn, Elsa, Spider Man
tailsmans.

IV. It’s Always Happening
By 4 on, our Fairmount streets
reprise June 2020 city sounds,
when helicopters hovered
like mosquitos over our homes,
when Black Lives would not stop
going viral in death,
so, perhaps, began to matter.
Public housing the knee on the neck
this time, the “I can’t breath”
for those mothers and children
who could not afford more
room and air.

V. Grieving
By dark, we dot the steps
of Bache-Martin Elementary,
clutching candlelight,
throats thickening
weary of saying their names,
the black and brown bodies burning
for centuries of escape.

VI. The Next Day
7 am morning
ignites flame-blue,
coral clouds
slipping by 10
into an ash-white sky.

My Future Memory

Will fail to lodge my failures
Emerge elliptical, curated
Like my mother-in-law’s
And my mother’s before her,
My hippocampus a dried porcini
Breeding blithe hubris.

Only my shining moments will survive my 80’s.
My children must witness
My embarrassment of admirers,
The plants and cards crowding my downsized space
A mere sampling, I assure them,
Of gifts appearing on my birthday.
Stories about my youthful beauty will surface—
Those waitresses who often mistook me for my son’s date!
Or more restaurant tales:
A beef chunk lodged in an old man’s throat
That I Heimliched across tables,
Diner gaping, then clapping,
I need wait only minutes
Before I deliver
My identical brags again,
And even again.

Will it happen gradually for me, then,
Or all at once,
Or perhaps, God forbid, not at all?
Will I be doomed to remember,
So that every night when I wake to pee
I am haunted by the times I drunkenly offended—
”Bitch” and “dick” jabbed at my friends—
Fucked my graduate TA,
Prayed for the badly receding hairline of my husband’s ex-
To migrate further to the back of her head,
Stuffed a neighbor’s mailbox with dog shit,
Offering her empathy and vowing to help
Catch the culprit?