I am standing
in the split second between flame and flood
where the forest screams in a voice older than language
and the rain answers like fists on a coffin.

The air tastes like burnt bones and rusted promises.
Eucalyptus leaves curl in pain,
branches like blackened knuckles claw at the sky
as if begging the clouds to remember
what mercy feels like.

I breathe in fire.
It scalds the inside of my ribs
until my heartbeat becomes a war drum
calling the inferno closer

The ground is a breathing being
and right now,
it’s gasping,
lungs collapsing under the weight of a century of smoke.
Every footstep feels like trespass.
Every inhale feels like theft.
And then
the heavens break.

Rain doesn’t fall,
it slams,
a thousand tiny hammers on the tin roof of the world,
drumming a dirge over the ash.
Steam rises in ghosts
white as denial,
thin as the excuses we tell ourselves:

It’s just a bad year.
It’s just bad luck.
But for the wild,
This is prophecy,
written in smoke and silt,
signed in the sweat of farmers and the salt of drowned streets.
The fire eats until it chokes.
The rain drowns until it’s dry.

Two opposites wrestling in my peripheral vision
like rival gods over the wild
while I stand,
small,
human,
breathing their chaos into my lungs.

I remember when rain was a lullaby,
when fire was a hearth
now they are both teeth,
gnashing,
hungry for the marrow of the earth.

Somewhere,
beneath the hiss and crack,
the wild whispers:
“I am not your battlefield.
I am your body.
And you are setting yourself alight,
then trying to put out the flames
with your own tears.”

And I think about the oil in the oceans,
the plastic in the bellies of birds,
the coral bleaching itself into a ghost
to escape the fever we gave it.
I think about politicians
who hold our future in their hands like an ice cube
and watch it melt.

I want to shout an apology
but my voice is a matchstick
thin, fragile,
ready to catch.
So I scream instead.
Not to be heard,
but so that the sound joins the storm,
so that it weaves through the wildfire’s roar
and the rain’s relentless percussion,
so that maybe,
maybe
someone in the silence after
will listen.

Because the sky will split open again.
And next time,
it might not close.