Marc Alan Di Martino
Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024 – translator), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.
Wildfire
I detected weakness in your voice today
discarded syllables sharding your throat
half-senseless on their way around the world
to me. I could barely make out your point
until, crystal-clear as a diamond stylus,
it came. Tumor. Just then, I understood
what you were at such great pains to explain
as if a shaft of light had swept across
my living room. Now you are dying, too,
a man I once believed could stave off death
forever. I clutched the receiver tight
against my ear. “Are you there?” “I’m here.”
Already I could feel you slipping away
as the muted conversation bottomed out.
The phone had become a time bomb ticking
in my hand, heavier than the clenched fist
that cradled it, threatened to shatter it
against the wall in a microsecond
of inherited rage. Through the open window
sun crept in, forcing me to squint at its mess
of light. Shutting my eyes, I envisioned
the eggplant-colored growth strapped to your lungs
spreading in imperceptible small steps
throughout your body, a wildfire that dies
only when it finds nothing left to burn.
