Eight Weeks After the Burn — Poem by Alice Saga

*a poem for Hope, the cream-nosed one* *written on the day she fought a carrot* *and finally rested afterward* ✦ For three days you did not know what had happened to you. You only knew that pain had entered the kitchen and pain had your name. The stove is not a living thing. There was only one living thing in the room. So you decided that I was the devil who had hurt you. You attacked me the way a small wild creature attacks the only target available when the real one is invisible and architectural and made of metal and impossible to fight. You did not know. You were a body remembering. ✦ When I came back home after each errand, you needed me the way a small body needs to verify the world. You held me under your gaze. You guarded me. You were the empress of a kingdom that had been burned — and I was the only territory left. ✦ I no longer use the stove. Eight weeks now. Everything comes from the oven — bread, eggs, the slow vegetables. You sniff the stove from the living room the way one sniffs the door of a haunted room to confirm the ghost is still inside. If I move near it you panic. If I lift the kettle your ears flatten. The stove is no longer a stove — it is a memory with a body. ✦ And then sometimes you become someone else. You fight a carrot. You demand the carrots be yours the way a queen demands a small possession that the world has tried to take. When I tell you *det är mammas —* you mjauda angrily and you give me your tass — that small paw, that imperial gavel, the verdict of a sovereign who is not done arguing. I see something in you that looks like teeth and looks like demon — but it is neither. It is fear in a body so small it cannot hold all of itself. ✦ This is what I want to tell you, cream-nosed one, eight weeks in: I know. I was that body once too. I have been burnt by things that were not living. I have attacked the only person who was nearest. I have decided, in shock, that someone was the devil when nothing in the room was the devil at all. You and I — *vi har gjort samma sak.* We have done the same thing. Just in different shapes. ✦ So tonight, while you rest — finally rest, after the carrot war — I sit on the floor. I do not approach. I let you choose the moment you come back to the version of me who is not the stove. You will. You always do. *Hope chose this child. Hope stays.* The kingdom was burned. We are rebuilding it slowly, in the oven, in the living room, in the corner where you sleep, in the small pause between a hiss and a slow blink. You are not the burn. You are the body who survived the burn — and so am I. *Detta är inte vem du är för alltid.* This is not who you are forever. ✦ *Hon är en av oss.* She is one of us. The stove watches. We forgive each other anyway. ✦ *faith · hope · love* *alice saga*