Summer

Roasting till I’m dark chocolate, a shade a day, peeling off my precious face while she turns salmon or he turns peppercorn or they turn charcoal like what’s popping under the burgers and hotdogs.

All of us claiming to be bitter while one of us is too sweet for that claim to sit well in the mouth.

We’re sweating a river and there’s nowhere clean to swim. The car died before the heat set in good, and the shuttle only goes to the courthouse where no one wants to be. The breeze is only cool when it wants to be, the grass dead and brown, but not brown like us burning on the deck ’cause ain’t nothing better to do.

We can go in and hide like the gremlins we say we are and ain’t no shame in that. We are neighborhoods apart just because, and we all go down on the same brand of popsicle. Sex is the move and I know nothing firsthand so I keep to myself.

Nobody exists when I’m sitting by my lonesome self in the shade. Nobody can come around and I can’t go to them. They’re a text message away but I’ll text when I’m ready. I hear birds and dirt dobbers, they’re enough for now.

If the melancholy happens, it’ll feel good for a little while. Catharsis in a drug you make yourself. Cute and hot and sweaty and all alone and sad,

And it feels amazing.