POETRY

When I Was Fire

By Sam Ross     VOLUME 51.1

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I never mourned. I had to begin
and begin again, with hope,

before I could look back
at what I had done

and to whom. When I was fire
I felt my bull beneath me

in the chute. The sky was a wall
of stuck-shut windows.

I hadn’t thought in this century
it was possible to smell God—

but something in the soil
the very last time. It was there

when I let the bull bolt
from under, circle, and face me.

It was there where I bowed to him
burning—perfume.










SAM ROSS’s poems have appeared in Tin House, New Republic, Gulf Coast, and other journals. He is a 2016-2017 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

VOLUME 51.1