Reset Forty-Two, Day Twenty-Two

[rejectomorph]

So I've been sitting here for an hour unable to hold a thought in my brain long enough to write it down. The heat is taking its toll. I also forgot to turn the fan on and open some windows, so the apartment is hotter than it need have been. Saturday wasn't the hottest day yet, but it was pretty damned hot, and today will be hotter. I guess that's pretty much all I can think about. Dinner sandwich on the last two slices of bread wasn't very good. I have no idea what I'll eat tonight. Nothing I have on hand appeals to me. But the grapes in the back yard are ripe. Maybe I'll just eat grapes.

Sleep soon, I hope. First this:



Sunday Verse

Look

by Belle Waring


Your street at sundown.
Your window, the only one lit up

in all those apartments
stacked silhouette black

against the sky—what a color!
like Sargasso—

loud, like they threw blue dye in it.
Citizen, look up,

the sky god is speaking.
Man, that blue is talking:

You there on the old old earth,
listen to me, don’t blast yourself.

There: the woman on your balcony.
The woman you let slip—

her forearms on the railing
letting the breeze mess with her sleeves.

Behind her in the room
the books unbend

hover off the shelves
and like a small space station

they wheel like electrons in her skirt—
the books open up to the lines you want

open like air
like water that opens wherever you already are.

Man, look up. Even a small child
has sense enough to drink that blue

whose beauty wounds him so precisely
he knows his life is worth saving.