Blessed humidity


The August heat in Ohio thickens like vanilla pudding, settles our differences just by
exhausting them, vanquishes the ice in soda pop. 
​Everyone on the block is restless and immobile in the humid dark.

On the front porch glider, Chrissy and me talk about martyrs:  Joan on fire,
Wilgefortis' spontaneous hair, and Claire, patron of the TV but we're not sure why.
While we trail sweaty Coke bottles up our arms we make a pact,
we will not talk about the universe expanding, we’ll steer clear of infinity.  

There’s little left to wonder about so Chrissy turns to our new favorite:  
Are there really flying saucers? Did they hover over Lake Couhasset in July
like the Mandel brothers claimed? 

Turn down the streetlights, Cousin Polly, swilled in late night TV light, yells.
Aunt Pauline’s dream is punctured by Polly's lament, she shifts
in the reclining chair, fake orchid pinned in her strawberry-orange hair.  Her
phlebitis leg, color of eggplant, rests on avocado brocade.

We play Rockettes, slip our nightgowns off one shoulder, practice swinging our legs
out in sync, tap our flip flops on the cement porch. We've been through what we
think couples do at night, we've named our future babies twice.

Next door, Mrs. DiVito, is restless, peels back her dining room drapes, delicately as
skin from a burned shoulder, she eyes us suspiciously, her mind a weedy lawn. 

Over the rounded arbor vitae sculpted like breasts, our feet mea culpa.  We see all
the way down the street to motherless Star Lutari's house--front doors open like
the glass eyes of St. Stanislaus; screens breathe in, out, in with each useless spin of fans.  

Everywhere crickets shriek for mates, and down beyond the Buckeye trees 
the tower of WKBN endlessly blinks red, broadcasting to this stifling steel mill town. 

The Cardinal thermometer's mercury goes beyond his ruddy throat and we play
“new words”:  sluggish, perspirant, muggy, sultry, clammy, stifle, stuffy, sticky.  

We sneak around the ominous backyard---where peeping Toms or horrid snakes
lurk in the basement wells---we brave the bat attacks to find relief. 

Careful of the screen door slap we slip into the kitchen, step stool up, stick our
heads in the freezer.  

There is no mercy in a late summer Ohio night.


Finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Award and published in Paterson Literary Review.