Mythology

Did you know I set myself on fire

just for the smoke.

Did you know the world set itself afloat

and everything melted

back to Pangaea

with no boats.

Did you know we arrived at an island

where my lungs floated above the trees, becoming clouds

that I held onto like balloons

along with those of every other child

in this city. The myths carried in this land

blaze through the hills.

Over the smokestacks,

we don’t speak but run our fingers

down the landscape. My lungs

two powdered rooms,

but I am not thinking

about lungs, only fire.

A landscape of ash. I fell asleep

in the car, this morning

on the highway, and I dreamed

the fog was a shifting ocean

covering the valley. No fish

between the mountains, which became islands,

which I climbed; out of the earth came smoke,

the flames coal-black. And the whole time

I was the earth, I was the fire,

the car and highway and every path

that leads to the ocean:

drained of fish,

drained of life. The land already sunk

into my eyes: closed in a garden

of flames.

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Taylor Fang is high school student living in Logan, Utah. Her poetry has been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Blue Marble Review, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and The Poetry Society UK. b. 2003