Where the scent went cold
an encampment, lighter fluid
where someone cooked, warmed
himself in the slow decease.
All remains are human
I think this morning where
I put out a fire in the woods
a campground left over.
Ruins nearby, a charred grill
grown still, sending up mixed
messages, smoke signals rising
puffs of soot as though someone
had been burning sonnets
instead of documents, traces
of what’s left to hold dear
a new hole to fill the earth.
—
Michael Magee has lived in England and recently travelled to Budapest, Hungary. His new collection, Shiny Things, published by MoonPath Press is coming out in January 2025. He has read on BBC Radio 1, at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and at the Dancing Poetry Contest in San Francisco. Other work had been published in Verse Daily, Writer’s Almanac, Poetry, and Poetry Atlas. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.
