I've begun lighting bonfires on the beach to sacrifice my lovers into thin air. Our bodies rise up ghostly in the night and our hearts dissolve with the smoke. Names lie scattered through cigarette butts on the shore, spelling out the days and months that we were together. I count: two thousand, three thousand days, little bits of Sundays and Fridays.
        In a flash I dust the fire with black powder, taking cover among the reeds. I watch. Boom! An explosion for how it ended.
        When the fire soothes itself to vapors I dart over the coals, my feet brave and bare. These parts are the strongest of every part of me, and I am not afraid of the black heat. The burns make me a maddened woman and I rush the waves in my terror. War cries pry open my lips with rage. I draw seawater into my mouth, sputtering out all of the little fingertips once sunken in my belly. Unbearable moles and forgotten calluses drip off of a sooty chin. I spit up deep.
        The wind blows back the world to me. I apologize to the sky for troubling it with my past. The remaining smoke fills my nostrils and I exhale deeply into my knotted net of knowing. All that remains of the practice are my flaming feathers and some shattered beach glass, littered and dulled among clamshells. I rise up through the dunes, hair matted and strewn heavy. "Nothing comes of this ritual save for the forgetting," I sigh. Nothing comes of becoming a girl again.

by mindy roth