The Burnt Apartment

Poem that came to me in a flash from nowhere.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

I learned to mourn moments
when my childhood suffocated,
under ashes of bricks and cement
spewed out by the exasperated embers
provoked by a cigarette butt kissing cotton,
like a phoenix made of pearls and chrysoberyl
that never got the chance to surge out of the flames