Offshore Breeze

(i)

The honeysuckle spoils the afternoon
I go out into the scorch and ignore it.
My coffee hot as always, the dusty town cat

curled at my feet beneath the shade
of my table. The rest of the town has canceled
their meetings, but I am here, in plain sight,

want no plot out of a simply hot day.
This is my hard self, taught by grandpa
it was nothing to pull two jobs in a day;

it’s all a trick of distribution of attention –
if you hold a baseball bat like a candlestick
it loses weight, and you swing a sweet sharp

double-time, even when the heat would dry
your blood as quickly as fallen rose petals.
A sunburn only hurts if you give it the time to.

Someone must mourn without breaking
a sweat. This I gathered from example.
 
 

(ii)

My other self decided the best way to deal
with the suck of the heat is to play dead,
lie in bed and count the rotations of the ceiling fan.

The fruit flies are after anything
that has even thought about giving up on life;
the small banks are soft and easy for the picking,

and I want a cool damp towel laid across my forehead
but won’t get it myself, am too sultry
to swat any bloodsuckers off my crown.
 
 
 
Andy Powell is a Teaching Artist for DreamYard and Cooper Union, has poems out or forthcoming with Winter Tangerine, The Rialto, half mystic, SOFTBLOW, Jerry, elsewhere, and is a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal. andy-powell.tumblr.com