After the Camp Fire
by Rae Gouirand
That November, I have to mask to leave the house, to take out the trash, to pick up library books, to return library books, the air putrid with smoke that’s hung for weeks since the fire that burned Paradise two hours north of us. We’ve been in the house, under the same roof, six months, have barely just begun to kill the thirsty lawn the realtors automated only for us to refuse to water it. Cars, rooves, sidewalks turn different shades, greased with ash that grows more dimensional, more iridescent as the days drop out their bottoms and blur together, indistinguishable from the smoke. Go driving, the horizon is nearer, comes so close to the body, it feels a little like one’s stepped into mud-bottomed river that may never again settle, may never again go clear. An accretion, an accumulation, an unendingness as the atmosphere fills and fills with silt, no rain coming, no way to lift the lid. It has been two weeks. The streets are empty aside from the wild turkeys that roam the neighborhood as they do in northern California every November, picking apart the first of the fallen citrus in driveways, pulling late kale and chard from neglected beds, roaming at a speed that doesn’t betray ravenousness. Schools cancel, offices cancel, everyone says don’t go out. I can smell the damage through my mask, despite the fact that it’s rated the highest, so after I push my library books through the slot, I walk around the front of the branch, its assuringly creamy Spanish colonial stucco face, to the rose garden that the Friends tend. I might as well: I am clearly not protected. I breathe as much of what muscles through the air as any living thing; I feel my tongue going flickery, just as I do in my house, its chimney flue locked in open position, particulate motes floating out from the black gates. Roses that have been open more than a few hours have collected the foul residue in the folds of their petals, and have ceased to read as flowers, but those on the edge of flowering reveal shades that read as shock. Momentary, all of them, in every shade from yellow to scarlet to lilac. And scent! I inhale as though starving, as though praying they might grab hold of some sensory receptor inside and overwrite the only message. Into the noxiousness the roses assert their fragrance, almost an I, as suggestive and out of context as similes.
Rae Gouirand is the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018) and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, Bellday Books, 2011), the chapbooks Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, Swan Scythe Press, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition, Educe Press, 2018), and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (winner of the Open Reading Competition, The Atlas Review, 2019). She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at UC-Davis.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “After the Camp Fire”? I think for almost everyone who lived in northern California in 2018, November of that year represents a crossing-over from a before to an after (or a since) in terms of our direct, lived experience of the climate catastrophe. A few months before the Camp Fire, my wife and I bought and moved into a fixer-upper in a town where neither of us had lived before, so in the background of that moment for me were these other ways my day to day was being re-ordered and re-oriented. This poem came out in one straight shot, in the present tense, about a year ago–the first prose poem I’d written in years and the first clear sign for me (prose poem as indicator species?) of a new body of work that I’d already been quietly adding to for a couple of years without understanding it as anything.
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