Self-Conflagration 

Khloe Kuckelman

CN: panic attacks

We skip around the wooden-lidded sandpit
Teetering on and off lime blend turf

I’m the guide, the one who says watch your feet
while you comply through a crooked smile

My eyes are always on the sky, watching, waiting
I’ve got artificial grass stains tattooed on my knees

They say the clouds parted into a fallstreak hole
the first time it happened, just a few years ago

Light streamed through my fractured body like a
Fresnel lens, concentrating all of me into a single beam

All I remember is the heat. The grass around me
erupted in flames as I burned, so honest, so afraid

of what it meant to be alight. The smell of it,
plastic nature, ovaling flammable vapors.

Perennial, resentful of preventions,
of my careful attention to chemistry,

Doomsday comes. The sun scours the planet,
finds the flimsy, camouflaged combustibles, and begins.

Walking obliviously by my side, you point to a
cloud and ask, doesn’t that look like it’s opening up?

The focal plane finds me like a spotlight,
smoking a hole through my persona

Grass goes rubber, sand loses its crystalline
structure, I go amorphous solid, then liquid

Adrenaline and cortisol flood the bloodstream
High-alert, a physiological change that can find

danger in the shape of a cloud, physical 
threats in social exertion—anything, everything

I feel your fear turn to hatred,
palpable through the smoke

I told you to watch your feet, I try, but
it’s too late—you watch my expression

melt—see the brown in my eyes glow hazel—
gasp as negative thermal expansion shrivels

my skin beyond recognition. For a second,
I am all of the light in the world

The Science

The poem compares the chaos of conflagrations with the body’s reaction to panic attacks and panic disorder. Fire is complex and unpredictable due to the combustion process. I view panic attacks as unpredictable and chaotic spurts of intense fear, similar to fire. Some common physical symptoms during panic attacks are sweating, hot flashes, and a sense of impending doom. All of these resemble fire in that they contain heat and unpredictability. 

As with some panic attacks, the trigger in this poem is entirely random; the sun hits the narrator in a way that would usually not cause the sympathetic nervous system to activate. Someone with panic disorder may feel a sense of shame for their symptoms, and try to hide that they are panicking. This poem addresses the perceived social ramifications of panicking in front of others, as well as how terrifying panic attack symptoms feel in the moment.

The Poet

Khloe Kuckelman (she/they) is a student at Kansas State University where she is studying creative writing. Outside of poetry, she is interested in many fields of science and law. They have been previously published in Touchstone Literary Magazine and Live Ideas.

Next poem: She Needs No Server by Annee Lyons