Self-Portrait in a Scorched Forest

David Ehmcke | Poetry

I didn’t ask to be trapped in a matchstick castle,

a natural labyrinth with a canopy-

roof and huge roots curled like the fists of men.

When I was born, I was planted,

an uncongenial husk, flaxen-haired with a hay-fever

face. For boys like me history’s a cleave

the ax intention leaves in the trunk of the oak

whose branches I hide in the faux-

fire of. Without tools, my ax is what I force

my hands to do. I make them into

a rabbit, then a gun, then I bang at my grenade-

heart like I’d the skin of a drum.

My hummingbird-eyes scan horizontally at a predator’s

declination. The crude truth of the tree

of life is life, for only some. I’m looking for answers

in the brush. I’m seeking the charnel sum:

the snake overhead that thrashes in the beak of a hawk,

the mouse now a bulge in the scythe

of the snake, the wild apple pocked by holes

the rodent made. But through a break

in the brute leaves a spear of light singes the foliage,

and lust for meat makes the camouflage

melt. So I’m running through bramble-wire, through

murderbird shadows, my body a dark song

chiding the old world to change. When I speak,

I throw the molotov cocktail

in the throat to praise a phoenix briefness, a slant look

at an ersatz hell. The forest, razed,

is a theater in which new life is staged. I’m out for

vengeance, misunderstood, a hateful blur.

I’m a weird disease, caustic, a jungle music tearing

through the trees. When the apparently

natural world moves around me, it forms a grisly whirl.

You are grotesque, it says, and I am

grotesque. But I’m the star of this picaresque.

When I sing, a flower burns.

David Ehmcke lives in Brooklyn. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Drift, The Missouri Review, Image, EPOCH, The Adroit Journal, MAYDAY, bodega, and like a field. David’s chapbook, Broken Lyre, is the editors’ selection in Quarterly West’s 2025 Chapbook Contest and will be published by them in the coming year.