Firebuggery

Simon MacCulloch: Firebuggery

Firebuggery

by Simon MacCulloch

Was it deliberate

When you burned the playground supervisor’s leg

With a magnified sunbeam

And the skin-smoke smelled like summer holidays?

Was it foreseeable

That you’d grow up listening to morning radio shows

On the properties of napalm

And learn mathematics from retired fire-bombers?

Was it inevitable

As the brazen bull began to glow

Under the magnified eye of Apollo

That your offerings would draw that gaze upon you?

It was unforgivable,

They told you as they tied you to a rock

Beneath a soot-flecked sky

That fluttered down with beaks to probe your entrails.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and publishes poetry in Spectral Realms, Black Petals, Dreams and Nightmares, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and others.

Cindy Rosmus originally hails from the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, once voted the “unfriendliest city on the planet.” She talks like Anybodys from West Side Story and everybody from Saturday Night Fever. Her noir/horror/bizarro stories have been published in the coolest places, such as Shotgun Honey; Megazine; Dark Dossier; The Rye Whiskey Review, Under the Bleachers, and Rock and a Hard Place. She is the editor/art director of Yellow Mama. She’s published seven collections of short stories. Cindy is a Gemini, a Christian, and an animal rights advocate. She has recently branched out into photo illustration.