Sarah Sousa is the author of three poetry collections, most recently See the Wolf, which was named a ‘Must Read’ Book in the Massachusetts Book Awards, as well as the chapbooks Yell and Hex.
“From the Book on Pit Firing Pottery” is the poetry winner of the 2019 Prose & Poetry Contest, selected by Analicia Sotelo.
I should have liked the burning more than I did.
The book on pit firing pottery said
feeding the fire, building the bed
of embers, is the best part; as primal
and satisfying as it gets.
I wrapped four lopsided pots—
friends have been so kind as to call wabi sabi
or rustic—in newspaper, placed them gently
on a bed of wood shavings. Each in its own way
off-kilter. Each squat and misshapen lump of clay
a fair representation of its maker. The inability to find
center, to grow vertically from it,
to make the left side congruent with the right,
in pottery, as in life, must be a vice.
All my hopes lay in the fire.
For my pit, I settled on a metal trash can,
layered paper, kindling, wood shavings, moss,
bark from several trees suffering
some kind of parasite, lichen, rusty barbed wire
and salt. All would bring the possibility
of orange, brown, green and black aurora borealis
to the lumpy, subterranean surfaces of my pots.
It’s hard to start a conflagration from the top,
but harder to reach beneath
the strange mound of combustible debris, eager
to quench my earthen hollows, earthen nests.
I used bellows, I used my breath
to keep the flames robust. I smoked and ashed myself
as much as the clay. When the fire got low,
I threw in handful after handful
of wood shavings from a bag of rabbit bedding
I bought at the pet store. The shavings burned
to black volcanic ash. I poured more,
straight from the bag for good measure.
The book’s one guarantee of alchemy:
wood shavings always result in an ebony finish,
the blackest of moonless nights descending. Essentially
a deep char, bread left in the oven, bones turned to coal.
But burnt bread and bones will crumble;
my vessels (at this point in the process the book
says I may safely call them vessels) might hold
wheat or lard, thread, beads, teeth.
But not water.
My fire couldn’t hope to be as hot
and efficient as an electric kiln.
Pots fired this way
will always be porous. The book warned,
what I was making wasn’t functional.
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