Those summer days

My backyard banana trees

After several days of thunderstorms and oppressive humidity, it feels today like early summer. Something about the light and nature bursting fireworks of color and everything so very freshly green. The heat feeling like a pre-heating oven waiting for cobbler. Soon, though, the really hot days will come as they always do and we all will be holed up in the chill of the A/C until, oh, probably November. And hoping for no hurricanes or, at least, baby ones.

I’m sharing this poem I wrote on a very hot summer’s day as I was lying on the couch watching an old movie. It’s really a story, or a narrative poem I suppose, that was published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature back in 2012. Hope you like it. Keep cool, kids.

Chimera

All I want on a Sunday morning is to
luxuriate in my laziness. I want to watch
old movies with the volume turned up loud,
the newspaper crackling as I shift my supine
body on the couch, the words of duplicitous
politicians and photos of narcissistic socialites
mashed under my ass.

I want to gaze out my window where heat
rises on the street like steam from a gumbo
pot while I lie, cool as a nectar cream snowball,
in my Maggie The Cat slip, painting my toenails
a color called Bad Influence.

I would sip Southern Wedding Cake coffee
from the chipped china cup I knocked off
the bedside table in a moment of
passion and savor a fresh chocolate croissant,
tender flakiness that melts on the tongue like
vampires melt in the sunlight.

As the sun climbs the sky, I'd meander into the afternoon
with the expectation of an early summer storm when
we would go upstairs and slip between our cool, white
sheets and not be heard from again until
Monday morning.