POETRY July 4, 2025

On Forensic Files, People Think Fire Destroys Everything, But It Doesn’t

not the naked rafters hanging / skeletal in the night air / charred beams braced / against a deeper black / not the largest bones / femur & skull / fire’s flickering shadow / fumbling over / mineral & marrow

/ not brick not cinder not glass /

not the sleeping seeds / of lodgepole pines / cocooned in resin until / kissed by the blue / heart of flame / not the swarms of greenbrier / tangles of thorn / unfurling like smoke / rising like song

/ not sky not thistle not light /

not the cliffs of clay / ossified white & ash-gray / cloud-fossils heavy with / ocean & memory / asteroid & ammonite / not the absence cratering / dry lakebed / silt & sand cradling / what emptiness is left

/ not iron not gypsum not salt /

not the silence smoldering / between breaths / still hot to the touch / embers blooming beneath the skin / not the ache that flares & settles / the slow pulse walking close / behind my own small heart / beating low & long / & longer

Note: Poem title borrows & paraphrases dialogue from Season 11, Episode 25 of Forensic Files (“Shell Game”).

Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection, Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019), won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from the University of Utah Press. The author of two previous chapbooks, her poems have appeared most recently in Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, New South, and Gulf Coast. She is a senior poetry reader for Cherry Tree, and she edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry. With Amber Taliancich, she co-founded and runs Perilune Editing.
Social Media
Instagram: @lindsaylusby
Threads: @lindsaylusby
Blue Sky: @lindsaylusby.bsky.social