My name is Podrigotuma and one of the questions I find most complicated to answer in the

world is what do you want? Desire, drive, ambition. These things are profoundly deep in

us and often we may not even know why it is that we're driven to do the things we do.

Perhaps we need to observe it, to notice it, to tend to ourselves along the way so that

we can survive our drives, too. Poetry for me is a drive, I need it. This is a curiosity

for me and other people's drives. Why do they do the things they do? There are so many

different ways within which desire lives in us, but it lives in us so deeply that it's

always worthwhile to pay attention to what the desire is and where and how it is driving

us. We give by Kevin Goodam. We give our lungs to the fire, their frothy, pink and trembling

capacities. The hinge work of our knees also. What's good of our backs we give, discs

in the spine flattened, springing to the nerves. Shoulders, tendon-bright, straining the

sockets. We give bros, we give gash, whatever bleeds, bleeds, shin bones, diverted from

toolblows, armpits, raw from sweat-rhymed, no-mex grating under line-gear straps, heels,

blister-geled popping back of neck-seared, blistered. Give ankles, hobbled ligaments

tattered, sutured, tattered. Skin we give to Ember, to Aramids, to the long memory

Cancer House. Ears, given to Squelch, break, rotor wash, a far-voice calling weekly for

water, for God who is water out there in the brittle woods. Give lips, heat crazed,

blubbering, double-time, double-time, water boiling from eyes, lashes, rancid nubs, a beard,

moustache, smoldering, tobacco spit, tobacco slumber. Fingers, in gloves, in ash, swollen,

cutty to the bone, lactic surge in arms and calves as we pause, swiping back the grime-slicked

hair, then bending to our ash-dark art once more. This poem by Kevin Gooden is from a book

called Spot Weather Forecast, a Fire Liturgy, which is just published last year. No of the

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