Oh July.
Sweet hot July in your chartreuse bikini that pings and pops like 4pm hail on the hood; you there sipping your medium cherry Slushie/throwing back your chlorinated hair /laughing with your friends/your bare feet shining like fresh clean snakes down in the grass/
YOU: stepping in melted ice cream sandwich over beneath the Yum-Yum Tree;
you really think you can hide from me?
From me?
My t-shirts are over there in the closet, marinating in the mothball dark. They keep me up at night with their damn crying. I left the final shirt of mid-September unwashed
on it's plastic hanger
so I could sniff around your vinegary edges during these
long
dark
days.
July, you are my jam.
I wish you were available for download.
I wish that the kids and I could go down in the cupboard underneath the sink and that we could walk back in there beneath the white plastic pipes and roll the big coffee can full of grease and old peanut oil out of the way and that you would come walking out of a hidden cave, yawning, smiling, stretching, flipping off the cobwebs and saying,"You found me!"
Why can't you just light up our sour house with your 50,000,000,000 gazzillawatts of sunshine and hot dry Vitamin C rain?
What's wrong?
What's wrong with you?
Do you miss me at all?
Where are you anyway...Australia?
I put the beach stuff up in the rafters of the garage. Should I get it down now?
Remember at the beach when you blew small Tasmanian devil clouds of baked sand into my earholes while my daughter happily ate a hotdog coated with specks of crunchy zillion year-old seashell as the seagulls dangled off of your hot fat thigh on those thin puppet strings of humidity?
Jesus.
Those were the days.
I love you/ should I drag the air conditioners down from the attic this afternoon?
Should I dump some gas in the mower?
Send me a sign, okay?
I'm gonna count to ten and look out this window and on ten you fly up with a baby kangaroo in your beak and then I'll know you are back, okay?
Okay, here we go.
One....The kids are turning pale in their overheated rooms.
Two....The dead are asleep in the cold hard dirt, one assumes.
Three...The deer are on the mountain where the winds are howling blue.
Four...The pale lame sun is in the cottony sky but it really isn't true.
Five...The snowbanks in the mall parking lots refuse to melt away.
Six...The crows out in the cornfields can't tell night from day.
Seven...The moon is frozen butter in a cold pan flipped upside down.
Eight...The soles of our shoes crunch against the rock salt on the ground.
Nine...The snowflakes pass the street lamps like August moths at night.
Ten...The train in the tunnel is but a distant whistle and but a pin prick of far away light.