Sharan Strange   CHILDHOOD Summer brought fireflies in swarms. They lit our evenings like dreams we thought we couldn't have. We caught them in jars, punched holes, carried them around for days. Luminous abdomens that when charged with air turn bright. Imagine! mere insects carrying such cargo, magical caravans flickering beneath low July skies. We chased them, amazed. The idea! Those tiny bodies pulsing phosphorescence. They made reckless traffic, signaling, neon flashes forever into the deepening dusk. They gave us new faith in the nasty tonics of childhood-- pungent, murky liquids promising shining eyes, strong teeth, glowing skin-- and we silently vowed to swallow ever after. What was the secret of light? We wanted their brilliance-- small fires hovering, each tiny explosion the birth of a new world.   STREETCORNER CHURCH Is grace delivered on twilight wings of air? Don't ask this congregation. They'd shout "Yes!" then breathe mightily to draw you in. A speaker strapped to a car roof floats gospel--a curbside choir-in-the-box. Graffiti-scored stone for pews. The ceiling dispatches prayer straight upstairs. Dubious oasis, Jesus might've shed bitter tears here. Three would-be saints in red-stained garb stroll by, mockingly sound the refrain: "Sinner won't you come?" The sun seeps burgundy, gone-to-glory behind the altar. The humming air of deliverance lingers like a cloying perfume.   Eglon Daley Shop Front 68" x 96", acrylic on canvas see more work by Eglon Daley         WORDS DURING WAR January 1991 The landlady's low hum of Spanish prayer mixes with the sound of eastbound planes overhead. She lights candles for the people there who are under siege, who will get no food, no water, and cannot, without the bomb's flash, see a loved one's face. I glimpse her family now and then, hear their cadenced voices, the heavy thumping of their steps. I'm taunted by the spicy smell of rice and beans simmering in her kitchen below me. The walls chatter, breathe salsa, their heartbeat insistent as my own. The house we live in, partitioned, some country with parts seceded, a body amputated. Blood, flesh, bone, skin--warm boundaries holding us-- and words, reducing us always to language, destiny, intention. When the rhythms I move to are disrupted by hourly reports from the battlefront, I let the barrage explode around me, grasp at meanings that linger like artillery's smoke trails or the dust cloud shadows of fleeing refugees. Downstairs, stillness descends like fallout. Outside, underground darkness, the electric tremors of people passing. I feel the gentle thrumming silence of our house this evening. I think of those others in the desert, their speech a code unbroken, their vigilance and combat breathing, the twisted, glowing wreckage of their land like a loveless machine.   THE FACTORY Talking about silkscreening, my aunt remembers her first job in New York, decades ago, at the Sample Co. near Chambers St., where she pressed glue through screens and stuck fabric pieces to boards. She was 18, scrawny, and no one's idea of an employee. In the employment office week after week, she met an ugly girl who made her laugh, and so went home with her. The city was full of people and, forgetting caution, she'd go wherever invited back then, even out to Brooklyn or to Queens. The factory was its own community, a motley group of natives and new arrivals, desperate or hopeful. Married or not, everyone, it seemed, found a lover there. But those who lacked the efficacy of English toiled all day, mute as machines. What became of them? Some escaped her. Others, who were long since hidden, come forward now, pushed by memory's levers. All left an imprint. The German immigrants, I'll never forget them: Casamia, the gypsy, and "Crazy Judy," nervous, saluting the boss with their number tattoos. Gentle Herman, jumping to his feet, clicking his heels.   SEDUCTION Not the round, shining globe of the eye in profile, nor the fissure of a smile calling, as the earthquake does, some part of itself back into itself, nor the curving spine, an archipelago of promise-- those aspects offer the primal gift. But voluptuous thoughts, entrusted to words, and words, the language of careful stones circling about you, and the fires those stones make, the air they eat up all around, leaving you breathless, the light they cast reshaping everything, and the new blood rising in you, molten, disaster.   ASH Today sun warms the snow. It melts and comes apart, running off in streams, crosshatching its way downhill. Water has a destination always-- home, to all other water. Standing in its path, I'm closed, a knot of grief, a stone. I'm remembering your words: I didn't choose this, and, Now survive. I hoard my losses against the chance that more will be taken from me. I want what babies want, sustenance when I call out. I want belief to seep in and find its level in me. I long for the things I destroyed-- our home, this season's food, small niches that might have been havens-- ground I thought I'd clear by burning-- even the remains, sifted, and settling over me.     Sharan Strange grew up in Orangeburg, SC, was educated at Harvard College, and received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Ash, winner of the 2000 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, selected by Sonia Sanchez (Beacon Press, 2001). She is a contributing and advisory editor of Callaloo and cofounder of the Dark Room Collective. Strange has been a writer-in-residence at Fisk University, Spelman College, the University of California at Davis, and the California Institute of the Arts. She currently lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches writing, literature, and social studies in an alternative school which focuses on experiential learning. Published in Volume 3, Number 1, Winter 2002.