Fire Season

BY NICOLE MITCHELL.

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I.         Fire Season asks: what weighs more, a pound of sentiment
            or survival?

            Popo doesn’t care to hear the difference between toneless English words
            only bends nearer to her sewing machine
            while in the yard the neighbor’s dog barks obscenity and
            Gonggong waters fruit trees
            whose branches carve the sky into stained glass.

            Last year’s pomelos
            sit dense on their shelf in the garage,
            rinds bitter as necessity, flesh bright and sweet.

II.        The first year we room together in Oakland,
            my sister buys me a lemon tree for Christmas.
            It’s novel, after a childhood of cornfields and soybeans and snow –
            A potted miracle, studded by the hard emerald beginnings of fruit.

            We rent a house my uncle owns,
            the driveway marked by a redwood
            the ‘91 firestorm didn’t take.

            He wants to cut the tree down, claims it’s too much work –
            roots that make the driveway roil,
            boughs always flirting with the power lines.

            Sentiment or sediment or survival,
            the city orders us to evacuate our tinder-lined street
            and neither lemon nor redwood fit in the car.

III.       A woman named Candy handles all Chinese services
            at Chapel of the Chimes.
            She speaks Cantonese to Gonggong, lights the joss,
            instructs us when to bow.

            The paper money took too long to come from China
            so instead we set fire to paper goods painted by my sister and me.
            With Candy’s help we burn a Birkin
            and a garden where all the fruit comes ripe at the same time.

            Like a stripper, Auntie hisses when we turn to leave.
            We laugh and let it slide.
​
            Ask Fire Season: How many generations til we swallow sugar
            without medicine to chase?

Femme4Masc Aubade

BY NICOLE MITCHELL.

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This love is patient
waiting in the piss-stale air outside a McDonald’s women’s bathroom.

Sentry against hard stares and whispered slurs,
this is a fierce,

full-bodied love
which accounts for not only bladders and stomachs

but for tongues and
circadian rhythms.

It lays heavy
while you drowse and I,

thick-tongued and clumsy-fingered
coax myself towards waking.

During this secret gray hour
my unfettered thoughts loop lazy

and insistent as the press of your sleeping limbs
against my own.

Here is the crepuscular truth
unfurling like a poppy:

Nobody told me it could be like this
for people like us.

I never dreamed I could have something so good
so orange silk, crystal dew sumptuous
​
as coffee grown cold
while I study the gild of lamplight on your cheek.

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Nicole Mitchell is a queer, mixed-race writer and educator. Her writing appears in Recenter Press, Teach Magazine, and Honey Literary, among others. She teaches elementary school in the California Bay Area. You can follow her on Instagram @niic.miitch.