by Kevin Grauke

for N.O.

There’s something perverse about a match, capped as it is by its own destruction.
If only I could let this be, yet another fruitless observation, but I can’t, of course,
not here, where it must be made metaphor along with dawns and depths and all darkling
things. I could say, We’re not so different, but you always knew this better than I.
Life is death’s delay, you said. And death life’s decay. Also: adolescence is senescence,
because small print ruined your eyes. I remember how much you read Millay,
who wrote of candles burning at each end, the loveliness of their short-lived light.
This was in that tiny poem “First Fig,” the name of which never made sense to me,
especially seeing how the second fig went on to speak of shining palaces built on sand.
Were you here, you’d be able to explain, no doubt, as both poet and double-end
burner of figurative wicks yourself, but here you’re not, and for so long now.
And where you might be I haven’t a clue. Have you? You might be floating
inside clouds of holy light and halos, I suppose, but if so, how you must despise it there,
considering how you gleamed like a fang the day you told me the truth about brimstone,
which the Lord rained down on Sodom’s sinners and burned in the lakes of Revelation:
It’s nothing but an old word for sulfur, the thing that makes a matchstick burn.
And so here I am, back where this all started, staring at this thick, red-headed toothpick,
thinking of you laughing down there in Hell, naming each of its licking, frolicking flames.

Kevin Grauke has published poems in such places as The Threepenny Review, Ninth Letter, Louisville Review, Minnesota Review, and Bayou. He’s the author of the short story collection Shadows of Men. Bullies & Cowards is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026. He teaches at La Salle University and lives in Philadelphia.