Firelight keeps trying on our faces,
not choosing, just testing who we are in the dark.
A match goes out. Then another.
Smoke lifts without asking permission.
The guitar doesn’t play—it presses the room,
string by string, like it’s checking for fracture in the air.
Wood holds the sound the way bone holds weather.
Every note arrives slightly bent, like it had to pass through something first.
No one speaks. Not because of silence,
but because sound is already doing the talking
wrong and right at once.
Outside, the night stays close to the walls
as if it learned listening from us and decided to do it better.
Ash drops without ceremony.
No one calls it meaning. It just falls where it falls.
Louie Rivers is a poet from Mississippi. His work explores memory, erosion, labor, landscape, and the physical remains of human experience. He is interested in how objects and environments carry emotional and historical residue.