Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.
The tongue also is a fire … it sets the whole course of one’s life on fire.
— James 3:5–6 (NIV)

The 2019/20 bushfire season was “far and away the costliest natural disaster in Australian history” and news of it even reached us here in Canada. There was also disinformation attributing the fires to arson rather than climate change, and as some friends and I were talking about it over drinks, one of them shook his head and observed, “It’s so easy to set the world on fire.” From that remark came this poem.

The other input was Robert Charles Wilson’s sci-fi short story “Divided by Infinity” (content warning: attempted suicide), which I discovered through Dinosaur Comics. The poem’s third stanza references the core concept of the story, that just because you’re alive — just because you’ve survived every close scrape you’ve ever been in — doesn’t mean there are no timelines where you actually died. If you’re here, it’s only because this is a timeline where you’ve made it. So far.

An early encouragement for my daily submission project came when the publisher, The NonBinary Review, submitted it as their nomination for Best of the Net.

World on Fire

It’s so easy, said James, to set the world on fire.
Imagine growing up with fire.
You would think things had to be on fire.
You would start fires.

It’s the dying God.
It’s the flickering of the air.
It’s the language of Aegeans.
It’s the crown of the charioteer.

In a way you are invincible.
Whenever you narrowly escape, two worlds go on:
one where you improbably survived,
one where parents are crying even now
and at your interment brothers discuss your property.
You leave infinities of grief — when you swerve.
And you go on living where the rules do not apply.

Imagine growing up with death.
You would think things had to die.
You would start fires.
You would sell whatever’s left.

When Denise and I talked about “World on Fire”, she gave her intrepretation: It’s easy to be careless, to find oneself living in a way that’s harmful. In fact, the longer you go on getting away with things, the more your circumstances delude you and you start to see yourself as invincible. You start to think you’re not bound by the rules that others are. You’re a special case. I think this strikes close to the heart of the poem.

The other aspect is that normalization means desensitization. The worse things get, the more we think what’s bad is de jure. Whether the first fire is set naturally or by choice, once we’re in a world of forest fires, the setting of more fires seems inevitable.

Soundtrack: “Care” (David Bazan) / “The Trouble with Normal” (Bruce Cockburn)

“World on Fire” was written in January 2020, published in March 2021 in The NonBinary Review, and read in February 2026 by Denise Callcott.

Denise Callcott is an author and bookkeeper living in London, Ontario. Here is a poem of hers in The Windsor Review.

“Animate Spirit” is one such poem that begins with direct reportage. A boy was eating chili sauce and just loving it, loving the novelty of the idea that this thing exists! There’s something about the way children get to experience everything for the first time that makes them like visitors on Earth, and that’s where this poem came from.

Animate Spirit

Across the aisle I saw a child eating chili sauce
and gasping, venting his hot lungs,
and thought how strange

is the animate spirit that enters a newborn
and feels to the ends of fingertips
as if inside a living glove:
kicks within feet, draws
eyelid-blinds, lifts up the chest,
parts lips, tries rushing out again
only to find the essence
has caught somewhere inside.

Only air escapes and air returns,
blowing the bellows on the tiny spark
that grows into a fire in the mind:
cool bright or dark heat, no fuel or ash,
and you remove your sandals
catching glimpses through translucent skin.

That day on the train,
a spirit with a few years’ use
of miniature hands and voice
dabbed chili sauce on tongue
and swallowed, gasped, screeched,
giggled and then tasted more
the sheer delight of living
in the little clean-swept home,
fresh and new yet to the earth.

He was laughed at by his little sister
freely — with joy and even pride,
the young eternity of little souls.

Angels wonder at that spurt of laughter,
discern a little less than God,
guess that in it’s something
of the power of good or harm
that someday gives new life,
or takes or loses it—
life whose force and love
is not as sweet as childhood dreams;
and yet what is it to the young,
what if not chili on the tongue?

The first thing that came up when my mom and I talked about this poem was the title and the whiff of dualism. One might see in “the animate spirit that enters a newborn” a sort of Platonic soul distinct from matter, but we agreed that we prefer to think of a unified whole — our embodiment is part of our identity. Does the spirit “animate”, as if a foreign element, or is it “animate”, breathed into life? There is certainly some imagery of inhabiting here, including the echo of Matthew 12:44, but also “little souls” (linking spirit and substance), and phrases like “fire in the mind” are more open to interpretation. Perhaps the ambiguous ontology is best represented by the paradoxical “young eternity”.

But more to the point, we felt that “Animate Spirit” isn’t really an idea poem but a scene poem. Even though a theological reflection ensues, the heart of the poem is just a moment captured because of the delight it evokes, as it was with “Year of Summer”. A poem often goes from the particular to the general, but when this works it’s usually because the poem declines to answer a question. We felt the final lines should be read not as the solution to a riddle, but as a clue or even simply an expression of wonder.

“Animate Spirit” was written in May 2018, published in March 2021 in Ekstasis, and read in February 2026 by Debbie Sawczak.

Debbie Sawczak is an editor and lexicographer in Georgetown, Ontario.

“Year of Summer”, a poem that was still fairly fresh when submitted, was the first one to be accepted a couple of months in. It was a lucky taste of success that encouraged me to keep going. If I hadn’t gotten a couple in near the start, I might have given up. But without further ado, the poem.

Year of Summer†

They walked her in a black coat
down the hill of cherries
backwards,
as though tearing her away
from the frail bursts of Japanese pink.
Staggering at the foot,
she calmly remarked:
“I tend to walk backwards, in winter!”

It was just as lovely
as the long peacock feather
standing out of a man’s shoulder bag,
torn like a comb,
writing his path
in the soil behind him.

At the zoo I saw the peacock
tail spread, walking backwards,
when I’d stared unseeing for so long!
A hundred sapphire eyes,
and a little girl beside me
kept crying “Where? Where? Where?”
even as I pointed.

A man’s hair curled to his waist;
he talked to ducks and chipmunks.
A stream of chk chk chk chk, 
allegro, ma non troppo, seven eight.
We see ourselves in the other.
Could you want a year of summer?

† The last line of this reading has been spliced from a different take.

Some thoughts whose pertinence (if any) is, far from being owed to my authorship of the poem, proportional only to my having forgotten it enough to look at it as a reader:

When Sam and I talked about “Year of Summer”, one of the themes we both landed on was how we see, and whether the way we look builds up or tears down. We agreed that it was important that the characters were drawn as “lovely”, not just eccentric: seen with delight, not condescension.

Not only is it about how we look, but also about not seeing at all. The peacock with its hundred sightless “eyes” is invisible, though not to a man who would write his path with its feather. So long as we look at a thing as we would at a creature in a zoo, we fail to “see ourselves in the other”.

We also talked about what the title means and how it relates to the poem. One of the threads in our conversation was Sam’s quoting Ecclesiastes 7:16: “Do not be overly righteous. Why should you destroy yourself?” We wondered about excess of a good thing. Summer is good, but could we stand everything always being straightforward? Do we need sometimes to “walk backwards, in winter”, our paths behind us?

“Year of Summer” was written in May 2019, published in January 2021 in Humber Literary Review vol. 8, issue 2, and read in January 2026 by Sam Wilson.

Sam Wilson is a Christian writer and university student at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

So much can be said, so little needs to be said. Whoever finds an answer should soon be about

forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings.

— from “The Secret” (Denise Levertov)

Probably most poets begin to work and continue a long time without being troubled by the question in the first place.

Nevertheless, “how we spend our days is how we spend our lives,” and it serves us to have some plan for one or both. So: why am I spending time making this Substack?

Here are four internal motivations for making art in the order in which they began to play a role in my writing.

• To enjoy yourself — the process of creation can be fun.

• To make something beautiful — doing a thing well can be satisfying.

• To express yourself — articulating your thoughts can bring clarity or release.

• To speak to others.

For some, this last might be completed “to spread a message” or “to evoke an emotion” or “to be understood”. Lately I’ve been thinking my favourite completion is “to be in company”. Art is both a subject and a means of conversation.

And perhaps a way of being. Although we probably have to do the writing alone, perhaps we can be writers together.

For this Substack, my hope is to be not just a writer but among writers. I’ll offer up what I have and see what, if any, response arises.

For now this will mean

• posting my published poems, each with notes and a reading by a fellow writer or lover of poetry recorded in the course of a conversation about the poem.

It may also mean

• writing posts on what my practical writing life entails — what has worked and been helpful to me and what has not — in the hopes of being a resource for others.

Soon I’ll post the first of the poems. See you then!