Brandi Homan is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books, a new feminist press publishing poetry by women. Her chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, was recently released from dancing girl press. Homan's work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from Salt Hill, North American Review, Fugue, CutBank, Natural Bridge, and others. She writes professionally in advertising while working toward her MFA at Columbia College Chicago. Homan recently completed her first book-length manuscript, Hard Reds.
Two Kinds of Arson
—And when it was bad,
we believed maple trusses
were enough. I was a charnel
not the clean soil of soybean
rows, but filth, the dark meat.
He’d tie my hair back in bows.
The doctors gave me naphtha
and told me it was a parade.
Sparklers swimming in slow circles,
I was in love with kerosene
from the fire breather’s mouth—
how to get so much from one body?
Genetic tinderbox,
girl gone up like a match.
Bones dried in, we fingernailed
brush rakes to the wall, spackled
sinkholes. I became acolyte—
prescribed burn so hot
these letters are firebrands,
this book an empty room.
