Portside

           in memory of Aaron Bushnell

Your shirt is flame-colored, 
in the photo, the tint of ripe persimmons.
You look up, at whoever is taking the shot.

Behind the fabric’s blaze
beats your unknowable heart. You have
a short scruff of brown beard,
pale broad forehead, brown eyes, brown hair.
Your face has that smile like the Mona Lisa’s.

It is night where you were, then.

The headline reads “Airman who set self on fire”
(you look barely out of boyhood).

You left your cat to your neighbor, 
a fridge full of root beers to a friend. 
(You must have sat together, maybe 
watching a movie, drinking soda and laughing, 
the way young men like to do.)

They say you loved to sing. You said
you didn’t want to be a party to genocide.

You must have been a kind person,
to keep a cat, to plan for the cat’s life
as you planned your own death.

(Did you bury your face in the cat’s side for comfort, 
and did the cat purr and butt you with its head,
claiming you in the way cats do?)

Now you have risen as smoke, as ash, 
as the odor of burning flesh. You cried 
Free Palestine as he burned. A sacrifice 
as we used to do, to appease the gods. 

Aaron means exalted one. 
Now you ride the currents of your immolation.
Now, you walk on air. 

A poet, herbalist, and garden-tender, Christine Holland Cummings’ poems explore our connection to each other and to the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in many journals, including the Iron Horse Literary Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and The Sand Hill Review. Her poems have been anthologized in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets and Our Last Walk: Using Poetry for Grieving and Remembering Pets.