We are freshmen fueled by pure
grain and dancing, losing easy
affection and our room keys.
Fire bores us. We use it to light
bonfires, clove cigarettes, textbooks
on the grill in the backyard
at the Phi Tau house. I knew
a girl who used the glow of a gas
stove to burn her arm hair off.
Damnation does not impress us.
We read Dante’s Inferno that spring:
Lusty whirlwinds, like ourselves,
or the Beta basement on Friday
nights, flames, boiling blood.
We meet gluttons in the icy
slush of never-ending rain, traitor
Satan begetting icy winds.
Who knew Hell might be cold?
Robins in Buffalo, perhaps. We ask
when we will read about heaven.
Our professor scoffs, Nobody
reads Paradiso. People only
want to read what they know,
and no one knows how to be
happy. We walk out, every one
of us convinced we are Virgil.
In chemistry, we learn that
when sulfur burns, it melts
to a red liquid but the flame
burns blue. Imagine the hellrave:
bodies writhing in blue light,
crimson pooled at their feet.
It would look like us, dancing.
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University, serves as a poetry editor at Iron Oak Editions, and works as a university library dean. Her poetry collections include FLARE (Cynren, forthcoming 2027), Babylon Songs (First Bite, forthcoming 2026), The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback 2019; Bellowing Ark, 2010), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), That Reckless Sound (Porkbelly, 2014), and Some Assembly Required (Porkbelly, 2014). She also co-edited Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Women Poets (McFarland, 2016) and Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing, and Teaching (McFarland, 2012). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Strange Horizons, Wild Roof Journal, Gone Lawn, and more than 90 others. Follow her writing at colleensharris.com
