Wake Up Calls

Please send rain.

One question not asked: is pain connected to the dried up land?

I am forced to walk up midnight's street in exchange for the lovelier, more well-lit steps after dawn. Maybe this is all part of the news that winter cannot ever be tamped this far north.

In the side yard, two empty camping chairs face each other as if having a deep and therapeutic conversation. Too soon I won't be able to sit in sunbeams; that is the saddest sentence August writes today.

I want to go along but I don't know how; maybe that's a little more sad after all.

What can I read that will end the distance I am willing go? The stars? Tea leaves in the bottom of Grandma's cup? Surely not Dickinson . . . her ability to hold Orion on the tip of her eyelash only pushes me further into you.

Lately, one-off acorns smack the roof and the glass deck table in the middle of the night. Wake up calls and the like.

Avocado toast. Breaking a fast. Who decrees, makes assumptions. Who ignores this, drinks day old coffee and calls oneself “happy.” Well, who am I to say? Just a witch or a faery or some other mythical creature you cannot hold.

The apocryphal apple begets hunger – or is it the other way around?

The smell of sun and sweat on tanned skin. Freckles finding their way. The words “window sill.”

Afterwards, I put my shirt back on, inside out. As I sat outside blue jays let me know that something was amiss.

Yellow jackets everywhere.