Dawn Dupler

When Neighbors Catch Fire

Two teenage girls run up our farm’s gravel drive, one carrying a baby, 
his bare legs sticking out from beneath a tattered blanket. They say 

to my grandmother, Our kitchen’s on fire. Can you keep him awhile?
I’m a child watching the two turn around and disappear beyond the hill. 

Back to nascent flames. My grandmother soothes the baby 
with her voice, folding him like whispers into the blanket. 

Years from now the girls will tell him how their brother poured water 
on a grease fire. How flames kissed the ceiling. How arm hair burned.

My grandmother holds up a blanket corner and points to the smiling 
bears printed all over. Brown bears, like the one in the roadside cage 

along Route 33. A gas station attraction, pacing and waning 
atop a concrete slab. Its water trough, dark and green. Dad says 

they rescued it from a fire, but it can never be happy. We don’t stop 
there again. When the two return for the baby, their faces are dirty 

and drained. I see corn lining the roads. The browning of their leaves. 
The height of their tassels. I once heard: When neighbors catch fire, 

we all burn. The sky prepares for darkness and ash.

Dawn Dupler’s poetry has been featured on the buses and trains of St. Louis’s MetroLink and in journals such as Natural Bridge, Whiskey Island, Moon City Review, and others. She is co-author of the book St. Louis in the Civil War and a James H. Nash poetry contest finalist. Dawn has an MFA in Writing and a BS in Chemical Engineering. Retiring early from corporate life, Dawn now teaches Composition and Creative Writing at the St Louis Community College and works as an Associate Editor of december literary journal.