Dear Memphis 
by Rachel Edelman

​                              You don’t just start a fire;

you build it. I’d ring 
her doorbell, eyes 

having leaked 
across my grandmother’s root-pocked lawn,

and she would split

sheets from a stack of Sunday Times
to feed the red steel belly 

she tended. Behind me, 
my own home 

bellowed in a blaze 
I lit but didn’t build. 

Her wedding ring spun
behind a knuckle swollen like a knot.

Bark grows thick around a loss.
Slip by slip,

words toppled, inaudible in my throat.
She was still breathing

when my uncle asked who might want the house,

and I felt fire in the hollows
of my ears,

years’ worth of sap 
seizing my mouth shut. 

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Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee. A semifinalist for the 2021 Discovery Prize and a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series, her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Narrative, The Threepenny Review, Wildness, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington and a BA in English and geology from Amherst college. She teaches high school English in Seattle.