Brushfire

Photo by Andrea Booher, FEMA Photo Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

We can smell the smoke from here, and ash
has powdered the hood of the car. It’s all that
fuel left from years of drought that’s burning;
the shredded cedar, tufts of grass tangled up
with horseweed like hair in a comb, one spark
and it all catches. At night, burning bindweed
smolders then glows red, winks out: a field of
fuses that outlines the firebreak’s dark erasure,
a break too narrow to stop the spread.