Written By: Vivian Pearl

There is a video of a fireplace on the TV

I can hear the crackles and see the light

but there is something missing from their red brilliance

I don’t believe those flames ever burned,

I can’t feel their heat.

They call me with cold robot breath

They make the fire in my veins goes mad with wanting

the sweet shock taste of the flames

and the smoke burning my lungs and eyes with a sweet pain

that can only leave me hurting and warm and full

with a pit in my stomach.

When I see the fire on the screen I am empty

and filled with nothing but a strong inhuman hunger

that can’t be filled by anything healthy for my body or spirit.

I need real fire on my tongue licking me inside

till I’m a charred suit of a girl

And I look the same but I smell like ash

and my eyes are red and my teeth are yellowed

and I am satisfied until the morning

when my lungs hurt and my head spins

and I go out seeking the flame once again.

I drink the fire,

I feel it inside my hollow torso

like a painful hug from my mother.

I don’t care what burns when I’m like this,

The whole forest could burn

leaving the world nothing but a desert for me and my fire

And I would sit back and watch things light

like a rippling wave

Until I saw the world was gone from me in the morning,

The world that has always given me a shelter and food

and a bed to crawl into every night

shaking and raw and smelling of smoke.

Last night my friends and I went to the beach and set some logs ablaze

I could hear it softly crackling in the dark

and I could smell the gentle sewage of low tide

mixed with the smell of smoke.

It provided our only light as it was whipped around by the wind

and it changed our faces

like we were putting on different masks each second

I felt its heat glowing warm on my skin

and I got naked and ran around it like a manic witch child

I jumped over it

And got as close as I could without burning my skin to the bone.

It reminds me of winter

When there’s less oxygen in the air,

And the worlds all darkness and dots of light

And all I’m thinking about is the big burning hearth

As I look at cold gray concrete dusted with white powder

And pray for the flame.

I remember

when I was young and cold

and the only thing that could warm me up

was the burning thing in front of me

like a beacon in the storm

I could feel its light

I throw so much in

Pieces of leaves and skin and hair

That burn and curl up into the sky

like dreams escaping a sleeping head.


Vivian Pearl is a New York native who recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a writer whose poetry and short stories have been published in various literary magazines. She loves horror and believes in ghosts and spirits, and aims to capture them in her work.

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