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STEVE, I SET YOUR TRUCK ON FIRE Kristin Kostick
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Steve, I am the girl who set your truck on fire,
who doused the metal and rubber and watched your books and boots shrivel upon the seats like weak, burning animals, who hid in the bushes for three nights as you, yourself, waited in the bushes across the street with an axe and the murderous swing of your mind, losing your shit and cataloguing your lost: Jane Mill's anthology of erotic literature, some tools, some poems about Lincoln, the pelt of a coyote you once shot in the head. There is a passage in a book by Piaget, which you should read sometime, about Piaget watching his 2 year-old boy popping and un-popping a canister lid to hear the sound, the certainty and consistency of that response, how the world became astonishingly real, —and, I bet, that sound resurfaced later in that Piaget's life as love and rage and sex and rivers and whatever is going on in the sky—it all conjures for me your melting truck, your stocky frame bounding from the house in your underwear with an extinguisher, a skillet, the flames opening toward the trees like wild, curious hands.
__ This poem is an homage to the poet Steve Scafidi who did, in fact, have his truck set on fire. He still does not know who did it, but maybe he’ll rest easier knowing it was me. His Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer I used as flint, after sleeping with it under my pillow every night, scheming to get his attention.
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