The Sulfur on the Tongue

The air before the boom tastes like dry metal and ozone, a sharp, electric prickle against the back of the throat. I remember standing on a cooling patch of asphalt, the soles of my feet still holding the day’s heat, waiting for the sky to tear itself open. There is a specific scent to a summer night—damp grass, exhaust, and that sudden, acrid bloom of sulfur that follows a spark. It is a violent, beautiful blooming that happens in the chest before it happens in the air. We are always waiting for the release, for the moment when the tension in our own skin matches the tension in the dark above us. It is a hunger for the sudden light, for the way the body flinches and then relaxes, exhaling the smoke of a thousand tiny, dying stars. How much of our own joy is just the relief of watching something burn itself out completely?

Ronnie Glover has captured this exact sensation in his work titled Blast Off. The way the light stretches and pulls against the dark feels like the physical ache of a firework climbing toward its end. Can you feel the heat of that sudden spark against your own skin?