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FURTHER READING
Poems by Joan Houlihan
H. Antecessor
Turn of a Year
Essays by Joan Houlihan
Can Poets Teach?: On Writers Teaching Writing
Related Poems
Burning of the Three Fires
by Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Morning in the Burned House
by Margaret Atwood
this kind of fire
by Charles Bukowski
Smell
by William Carlos Williams
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RAG SMELL. FIRE

 
by Joan Houlihan

RAG SMELL.  FIRE smell.  Bed blacked.  Bowl. 
The quiet come from living done.
Shadow built the walls, holed and cribbed with light.
Vine felt cracks and fingered in.
Were sky inside 
and what the wind-holes left, a wind.
Ay walk the last. What were floor 
heaves rock and root. 
Flame-eaten walls, rubs of wood, 
scraps the burn left licked
now licked with dirt.









Copyright © 2012 by Joan Houlihan. Used with permission of the author.
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