Talia Pinzari
Talia Pinzari is a poet and public relations director from New England living in Austin, Texas. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Salamander Magazine, EVENT Magazine, SWWIM, The Shore Poetry, The Museum of Americana, Berkeley Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, Pangyrus, The Indianapolis Review, Ibbetson Street, Mulberry Literary, and elsewhere. Pinzari studied poetry at Providence College and is a Pushcart nominee.
Dutiful Keepers
after John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather
Among other things,
when visitors from space
come to observe the Earth,
they will think of the human race
as a fire cult,
dutiful keepers
of a trillion daily flames.
They will marvel at Fort McMurray,
assume it to be our Mecca
with its flame stack of 60 stories
and hundred-foot flags
of blazing gas,
while 100,000 of the devout
tend to the site
to keep the tower burning.
Our libraries abandoned
and becoming more decrepit,
they will recognize our scripture
as the leaf-curl of burning
books. They will find
how we fuel the firewalls
of Data Center Alley
and Silicon Valley,
conclude water is unholy
and firefighters are heretics.
In Los Angeles, they will discover
a Department of Demons
fighting the flames
of our devotion,
and behold our rapture ablaze
in the Palisades
when their hydrants have run dry.
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Image by Fellipe Ditadi from Unsplash
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