during the so-called Cold War
Our backyard fifty-gallon drum
was mostly rust,
red-orange pulses of flame
lancing its sides
as my father fed it
cereal boxes and newspapers,
fading V-Day victory columns
corrected to smoke in seconds.
Everything was eligible:
an old catcher’s mitt, moldy,
ripped, its stench a burning dog.
Once, a stake of polished
wood, a piano leg, whose
lacquered brilliance burst into fumes
that stung my eyes.
Burning was as common as breathing,
and what would not burn
the first time flung in
would wait, soak up rain,
dry out in sun, crumple and shrink,
then join stampeding flames
when lit again.
How much poison we must
have created, how many
future heat waves, floods, dry spells:
paint cans, old galoshes,
early plastic junk,
transistor radios,
Cracker Jack gizmos
boys quickly broke
and tossed.
High on our switch-backed
ridge where the city
garbage trucks couldn’t climb,
we joined the steel mills
over the hill, our
daily backyard conflagrations
a rhyme with open hearths
below—
our hot messes,
our tributary blazes
that for generations smote the air
and threw such smoke
that even the stars
went extinct at night.
Come quickly: the past huffs up
the borehole
and all the hills turn black.
Richard Hague is a northern Appalachian from Steubenville, Ohio who has lived and worked in Cincinnati since 1969. He is winner of the James Still award in the Short Story, The Weatherford Award in Poetry, the Appalachian Writers Association's Poetry Book of the Year, and four Individual Artist Artist Fellowships in two genres from the Ohio Arts Council. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and nonfiction, he is past president of The Literary Club of Cincinnati. Recent books include, with Sherry Cook Stanforth, Riparian: Poetry, Short Prose, & Photography Inspired by the Ohio River (Dos Madres Press 2019) and Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, & Other Local Work (Bottom Dog Press 2018).