Fred Kirchner works with teens at the Dayton Metro Library, and as an Arts Educator/Poet in Residence at the Springfield Museum of Art and the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center. His chapbook, Platform of an Unacknowledged World Legislator, won the 2005 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. He has a lot of bicycles and calls his apartment—a curbside storefront—the Bike & Poem Shop.
3-alarm warehouse fires
can fill a neighborhood across
town
with the chemical reek of lighter
fluid,
but the stench mellows into the
woodsy musk
of a campfire by dawn.