This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burn by Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
The First Years
Locals call it the gates of hell, crater
in the Turkmenistan desert burning
forty years. The longest-burning fire began
six thousand years ago—an Australian
coal seam in New South Wales ignited by lightning,
smiting the biome into barren trails.
But I always come back to the coal seam
blazing under Centralia, Pennsylvania,
where a trash fire plumed against veins of earth.
Since then, it razors through mines, sixty years
feeding on bituminous coal. This is us,
love, hitched at our flash points, flaming head of us
lit incandescent. We are soot torching
ultraviolet, photon emissions burst
from atoms. We wear each other’s infrared bands.
In outer space, any flame turns to blue sphere.
But here, our first year, we radiated white.
Rages birthed divorce threats, smelted into sex.
Now, we are flameless combustion, licked flint,
divine red. Love exists in spite of us.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
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