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Prairie Fire
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

Prairie Fire

by
July 4, 2022
Painting of a prairie at sunset
Sunset Of The Prairies, Albert Bierstadt

R.B. Simon is a queer, black disabled writer who has…

Prairie Fire was previously published in Cutleaf Journal

Each year, the placard tells us, Ho-Chunk Indians burned this prairie to ash, rooting out invasive species – the buckthorn and the honeysuckle, so eager to conquer and upend precarious order. Still, when settlers came, with their muskets, beaver traps, plagued blankets, larceny disguised as gratitude no cleansing burn laid clean the land no prairie fires released the seeds of a new spring and the ancestors’ ghosts wept.
Today, trudging up sage-drab hillside snaked by waterways, lined in desiccated grasses, looking down on fields of oxtail, purple coneflower, silky aster cleaving mightily to the embattled substrate, clamoring their defiance in gaudy hues, I am thinking of how the Ho-Chunk know a secret: that to destroy something so very precious to you, some part of what you call home, is to let it return to you filled only with the essence of all it was ever meant to be, black and bare, seeded and ready for spring.
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R.B. Simon is a queer, black disabled writer who has been published in multiple journals, among them pacificREVIEW, The Poetry Coop, Strange Horizons, Literary Mama, CALYX, and Obsidian. Her chapbook, The Good Truth, was released in July 2021 from Finishing Line Press, and was a Finalist in the WI Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Contest. Her upcoming full-length collection, Not Just the Fire, is forthcoming in March 2023 from Cornerstone Press. In her free time, she enjoys creating visual art, napping, and coffee-flavored caffeine. She is currently living in Madison, WI with her spouse and newborn daughter.

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