PhillyCAM is people powered media including a community media center, TV station and FM Radio Statio. Listen here to my interview (which starts around 10 minutes in) and hear some smokin' hot tunes with Monnette Sudler, Joilet Harris and the RetroLove band.
In other exceptional news, my poem Fire was chosen as the winner of the Philadelphia Writers' Conference Spring Forward poetry contest! This garners me a partial scholarship to the conference, a slot as a featured reader and some much needed inspiration for some new poetry after RetroLove. You can read more about the award and the conference here. All of which goes to prove that sometimes you can master something really scary...by writing about it.
Fire
Only a small fire but not where fire should be—
the
wick of a candle, hearth, heart—
a
fire uncontained, unattended.
I was reading.
Of course, I was reading,
and
making tea which I had forgotten.
It
was a good book.
No doubt I put the sound of the fire crackling
into
the story I was reading, the way
you
put a ringing phone into a dream.
Crackling—sometimes the cliché, a crackling fire,
is
true—fire sounds like snapped branches
or
crumpled drafts of a bad poem.
Curious at the sound, now loud enough
to
pull me from my book in which
I
carefully marked my place.
Fire on the stove.
How to douse it? A word I use now but then
only
out or just the desire for the fire
to be out
because
I am sure I had no words
when the fire inhaled, doubled,
spilled
toward me, skimmed across
the
inside of my arms
as I lifted the thing that burned.
Then it was out. Extinguished.
Sodden
in the kitchen sink.
I wonder now when I would have chosen
to
abandon the kitchen. The house.
The book with the
dog-eared page.
How high would the flames have needed to be?
How
intense the heat, angry and consuming?
Or
a child I needed to save?
Fire. Slur. Scuffle.
One
small thing.
Fueled. Repeated. Escalated.
Fight the fire or flee.
And
no time to take anything
with
us.
© Beth Feldman Brandt, 2017
