Old burn scars mar the brick. Today,
We scrub them with steel wool; our skin
The only thing we manage to scour clean.
It is easy to pretend it has always been
A photograph in black and white
Hidden in someone’s wallet, but that’s just it:
Someone was there to take the picture.
The dead mattered more than the living.
One night, the fire alarm didn’t go off.
The air inside expanded, nowhere to go.
Strangers made this house into a memorial.
Another generation of burn scars,
They were not the first thing to die in that house,
Just the first to ask why we let it happen.
Photo by Sotiris Savvides on Unsplash
