The First Years
The First Years
Locals call it the gates of hell, crater
in the Turkmenistan desert burning
forty years. The longest-burning fire began
six thousand years ago—an Australian
coal seam in New South Wales ignited by lightning,
smiting the biome into barren trails.
But I always come back to the coal seam
blazing under Centralia, Pennsylvania,
where a trash fire plumed against veins of earth.
Since then, it razors through mines, sixty years
feeding on bituminous coal. This is us,
love, hitched at our flash points, flaming head of us
lit incandescent. We are soot torching
ultraviolet, photon emissions burst
from atoms. We wear each other’s infrared bands.
In outer space, any flame turns to blue sphere.
But here, our first year, we radiated white.
Rages birthed divorce threats, smelted into sex.
Now, we are flameless combustion, licked flint,
divine red. Love exists in spite of us.
Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award and the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. She was a 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholar for the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and her work has been supported by writing workshops and residencies such as the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review, and she’s been featured in media venues such as Poetry Off the Shelf (Poetry Foundation), Inside Appalachia (West Virginia Public Broadcasting), and In the Moment (South Dakota Public Broadcasting). She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
