It’s Not the Heat,
It’s the Mortality
by Anne Haines
It was the hottest summer anyone could remember.
by Anne Haines
It was the hottest summer anyone could remember.
I
know Texans laugh at twenty, twenty-one days of ninety
but
some afternoons the air was so thick with humidity
you
could have spread it on a birthday cake.
Animals
died at the county fair, the grand
champion
hog smothered in his own incipient bacon,
lambs
panting behind the lemon shake-up stand.
Even
my sunflowers, bobbing and weaving in the front yard
like
stunned prizefighters, let their leaves wither,
collapse
like old women’s hands that have given up on prayer.
Seasons
like that, everything feels like a warning.
And
when the nights are no relief, the dark air limp and lowering,
we
lie as still as possible in separate beds
listening
to the dense hum of crickets,
listening
past them to the distant yip of a coyote,
past
that to the slow machine of weather
churning
in the distance, in the moonlight’s steam,
in
the unavoidable swelter of August’s waking dream.
Bio: Anne Haines’ chapbook, Breach, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. Individual poems have appeared in Diode, Field, New Madrid, Rattle, Tipton Poetry Journal, the anthology And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana, and elsewhere. She lives in Bloomington, where she works as the Web Content Specialist for the Indiana University Libraries. She can be found online at http://annehaines.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @annehaines.
Bio: Anne Haines’ chapbook, Breach, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. Individual poems have appeared in Diode, Field, New Madrid, Rattle, Tipton Poetry Journal, the anthology And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana, and elsewhere. She lives in Bloomington, where she works as the Web Content Specialist for the Indiana University Libraries. She can be found online at http://annehaines.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @annehaines.