Pure by Marcia Trahan

Pure

Listen: living
is what I want to talk about.

When my struggles ended,
I simply walked down
a newly opened path.

I saw the sun,
building gold and true.

Survival brings guilt
when so many go dark.

But I knew that
my spirit would not fly off,
the black earth would not consume me.
I saw grasshoppers flitting greenly at my feet,
I saw a cardinal dressed in its reds,
watching to see what I would do next.

In the exact center of my body
there was fire, an irrepressible flame:
fuel, not damage,
pure, no ashes.

Marcia Trahan is the author of Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession (Barrelhouse Books). Her essays and poetry have appeared in HuffPost, Two Hawks Quarterly, Wild Roof Journal, Cloudbank, The Rumpus, Catapult, the Brevity Blog, Fourth Genre, and other publications. Marcia works as a freelance book editor and holds an MFA from Bennington College. To learn more, visit www.marciatrahan.com.