In February, the creek flooded the fields forty yards on either side from the tracks to the freeway. That was the last of the rain.

The men in charge set the burn ban in June, but that didn’t stop them from striking us like matchsticks in the dry beds. Our blood, like a fresh, wet spring.

Our prayers cracked the corners of our mouths as a sheen of dust settled in September. The burn ban held even as the nights grew cold. We vaporized, hovered just above our bodies through the fall, followed our husks like swollen clouds.

For all our prayers, heaven never answered. But something did.

The night we turned back the clocks, a dark disc descended. The sky lit like a million suns. A theft, or a mercy? It culled us, body and soul, up, up with the water.

Vic Nogay is a writer from Ohio. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Naming a Dying Thing (Yellow Arrow 2025) and under fire under water (tiny wren 2022), and is the Micro Editor of Identity Theory. Find her at vicnogay.com or haunting rural roadsides where the wildflowers grow.