Obviously Scotland, I’d say,

if anyone bothered to ask

where it came from—really

from a bin filled with remnants

of failed love affairs. None

of these lovers was Scottish,

so it had to be acquired

tongue-in-cheek, from a yard sale,

chuckling heartily, har-har,

like a Scottish pirate lost

in a small town. It makes you

smile and think and fear

fire as focal point

of rites as frightening

as burns and not because

they’re foreign, but because

what scares and stokes us

isn’t that we’re different,

but that we’re all the same.

George Guida is the author of eleven books, most recently the novels The Uniform (Guernica World Editions, 2024) and Posts from Suburbia (Encircle Publications, 2022), and the poetry collections Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media, 2020) and New York and Other Lovers (Encircle, 2020). His new collection The Fulfillment Center is forthcoming from Foothills Publishing.