Two Poems
Updated: 5 hours ago
Daniel Nathan Terry
The Pyrophoric's Curse
Even the fire flickering in the hearth became quiet and fell asleep.
from “Briar Rose” by the Brothers Grimm
He is not the danger here: the quiet man you see
being wheeled from the surgical pavilion.
He wants nothing more on this bright morning
than the cold ginger ale and sweet graham crackers
they give him each time he comes to in recovery.
The fire in his mind sleeps again as soundly
as it sleeps in the lithium they give him,
that volatile metal they mix into a stable salt
that in its pure form would immolate him
the moment he drew a next breath or shed a tear.
It sleeps like his lust for the sweat on a stranger’s
chest, like the rage that wolfs its way up his throat
and roars when words fail him, like the garnet needs
ripening in the pomegranate of his heart. It sleeps
like the hearth fire in Briar Rose, cold and cursed
and surrounded by thorns, but capable of waiting
a hundred years to reignite and torch the castle
of your future to ash: give him money to rebuild
and he will burn through it, give him charity and he
will squander it, grant him, despite his betrayals,
mercy and he will make you wish you hadn’t.
Pyrophoric to its core, anything you add to madness
only feeds its all-consuming blaze. Better for almost
everyone concerned that twice a week he be
anesthetized by ketamine and paralyzed by
succinylcholine to keep his bones from breaking
when the electricity floods his brain and convulses
a backfire between his mania and your sanity,
a firebreak that makes him into something more
manageable and silent and, until the fire wakes
again as fire always does, seemingly safe to love.
House of Shades and Brambles
No stranger’s feet
Will enter me
from “Get Out of My House” by Kate Bush
Children always know when a house is haunted—that one
on the street in need of paint, shrubs overgrown, grass long
overdue for a good man’s mow, weedy goldenrod
where any decent person would have geraniums
and those scentless roses that HOAs and gas stations
can’t get enough of, the old oak at the foot of the drive
overrun with ivy and Virginia Creeper. Neglect
and an inability to interfere with nature are hallmarks
of earthbound souls and the living dead, and you can’t even
pay old friends to knock on their doors or ring their bells for fear
of what may answer. For a decade I let the garden go,
let the thorny smilax and snakeberry choke the flowers
I’d planted for our wedding reception when life was worth living,
let the Indian pink and trillium from my dead grandmother
die too. My husband tried to make me care about beauty, tried
to access my pride and nostalgia, but in the gray world
that consumed me after my exuberant madness and psychosis
were shocked out of me, there was no room for color,
no concern left for things like the opinions of neighbors
or self-respect. Inside the little house the children steered clear of,
I pulled the paintings from the walls, removed their Fauvist chatter,
rolled flat beige and gray over the rain blue and summer green
sheetrock, drained the color from my clothes, resented the pink
camellias of December that no longer spoke to me,
the jasmine and wisteria songs I could no longer hear. Silence
became a need, nothingness my only desire. No poetry, no
music, no hand on my thigh, no kiss on my neck, nothing
that could pull me from this bio-chemical exile, this quiet
and colorless intermission that was my 40s. Even my husband
who worked overtime to make me feel normal, who did his best
to pick up the slack of my depression as its inertia threatened
to undo me, began to call our house The Witch’s Cottage
as he tried to work a mow and prune into his impossible schedule
and attempted once more to conjure me from my shadowy rooms
into the green light of growing things and the few flowers
that were still trying to reach me. The Witch of Worth Drive.
The Ghost of Belmont. The Haunted Hovel. I sometimes wonder
what the kids called me, what moniker they gave my unlovely
and unloved home as they cycled and skated by. They couldn’t
have known what was really going on, or what truly hid inside,
but they knew enough to steer clear and to speak in whispers
when my shadow passed the dimly lit windows at night,
while I kept life paused, while I kept the wolf inside, sedated
and harmless and, for a time, safely uninspired.
Image © tofutyklein / Adobe Stock
Daniel Nathan Terry is the author of three books of poetry: Capturing the Dead (winner of the Stevens Prize, NFSPS Press), Waxwings (Lethe Press), and City of Starlings (Sibling Rivalry Press). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Cimarron Review, The Greensboro Review, Southeast Review, and his poetry was recently featured on Queer Poem-a-Day and the NC Poetry Initiative. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus, Hemlock, and Quarter After Eight. His recently completed chapbook, I Want to Tell You the Truth, is forthcoming from Squares and Rebels Press in February of 2027. His fourth full-length poetry collection, Lunatic, is currently seeking publication. He is currently writing a prose memoir about his senior year in high school, called Cult of 87: The Very Nearly True Story of a Teenage Warlock and the Town That Wanted Him Burned at the Stake. A former landscaper and horticulturist, he teaches poetry at Cameron Art Museum and lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his husband, printmaker and curator, Benjamin Billingsley and their dogs, Luke and Leia.