2nd Place
Claire Robey – ‘For Four Men’
A 27th birthday candle skewered into a saccharine whirl.
A sickly pink waxy spiral.
Its aspiration to be a statuesque column embarrassingly plain.
A puff of breath
extinguishes the oval
leaving a burnished dot in the black.
The embryonic fire struggles to re-flame.
My mild interest, mild indifference, as it wheezes alive again
until I care no more
and walk away.
A match scrabbled at random from a faded, water-damaged box.
A scratch flints the spark into a silent tear.
The gas blue heart and halo of ochre leave a neon sunspot on the eye.
Steadily, the flame eats along the wood
towards my fingers,
daring me to grasp until I lose the game.
I outwit and release before it sears my finger.
The flame is soundlessly replaced by a pleasing curl of scented white-grey,
leaving behind only a strange and beautiful spindle.
A Catherine wheel promises beauty and thrills.
A spiral of anticipation
bursts into bluesilver magnesium, sparking, throwing, ebbing, dying.
Underwhelming.
A house fire from an electric short,
vulnerability left unchecked.
The flame grabs, gobbles, scrambles, lustily inhales everything into its chaos.
An ugly morphing machine spitting crumbles of ash and mangled twists of pitchy tar.
Ripping through the room unhesitantly, inconsiderate.
Gulping air,
exhaling toxicity,
until only a putrid cloud is left.
Oxygen abused to fire even heavier slabs of fatal burn.
Breeding indiscriminately,
blazing wildly,
imprinting deep trauma.
Unable to avoid fulfilling its inherent, ugly destiny to consume.
Until a shocking deluge extinguishes its heart
and the flames
are dead.
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