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<< Back to Issue 5.2

The Book of Ash

Picture
                         Half-burnt, half-
buried, abandoned in a dark pit

dug out of sand—a book—beach chairs
all around it. No one else

even seemed to see it. That beach,
that spot—I read Of Mice & Men there,

years ago now, a worn-out paperback,
so worn the glue was brittle, so

brittle each

page pulled free from the spine
as I turned it. A windy day, each

page blew from my hand, skittered away
down the beach until

the last page . . . . Now, on my desk, The Book
of Ash
, ash fallen

on the floor around it. I ask my daughter
not to touch it but of course she

touches it, her fingertips black now. The spine
is burnt completely away, it burned

from the top down, the spine like a fuse, the flame
running down it while fanning

upward. Now, when I open what’s left,
it looks like wings. The book

(before it was set on fire), from what
can be deciphered, was a test, or maybe

simply a way to prepare for a test—pages
of stories

followed by pages of questions, the answers
multiple choice. A drawing of some

leaves, the answers on the facing page:
               a: burned b: holes c: displayed

                                                                Now,
when you open what’s left, ash falls like

tiny black feathers. Sometimes my body
is afraid--you would tremble

carcass, if you knew where I was dragging you
next
. Hold this wing up to the light,

the carbon letters

shine. Be. Fifteen. Was. This is how flames
will paraphrase us all.

This book, this ash. I try to pull it back
together, I glue each wing

into a clean white book.
​Nick Flynn's most recent book, The Reenactments (2013) completes a trilogy begun with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004). His previous book, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), was a collection of poems linked to the second book of the trilogy, The Ticking is the Bomb (2010). The author of the poetry collections Some Ether and Blind Huber, Flynn's fourth collection of poetry, My Feelings, is forthcoming in 2015. 
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