Black Fire
by
Barry Spacks


There's this girl pulling out her hair,
kept doing it till the age of ten,
no one could figure why,
including her. She favored one side,
so for symmetry her Ma
shaved the other, but mostly she went
bald and the other kids naturally thought, um,
weird, but now she's a Purr-fict Princess,
coiffeur intact, smiles when she mentions
those days of misery-mystery.
Have a gaze at her shining face,
you can't even catch a passing glimpse
of the lava roil that once within
exacted pain after twitchy pain,
that vast dark now a sleeping volcano
that burned through her once with hard black fire.

Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.

Want to comment on this story? Click Here to go the Literary Review Discussion Forum (for the subject, enter "Comment on story Black Fire")