Soft is Not for Touching

I am tender
like fire
is tender.
I am difficult
to tend, easy
to put out, needing
only a tired man
pissing in moonlight
outside the tent.
But have you ever seen
desert mountains
wild
with fire—
all that destruction
for reclamation ?
Like that,
I am a force-
ful kind of tender.

Marie Kressin

Marie Kressin is currently an MFA candidate at the University of the South. She graduated with a creative writing degree from Hendrix College where she was first published in the award-winning literary magazine, the Aonian. Since then, she has been published in Arkansas's Best Emerging Poets. She supports her habit of paying rent with a full time position as a writer for SchoolCEO, a local education-based magazine.