passports, abstracts, and cigarettes
i swear it was all just for the aesthetics
thin walls, smoke screens, and window tints
we crawled through one just for the hell of it

it's nineteen and nose rings, i got asked for an id
we're twenty-one in jersey, you like my con artistry
i borrowed a street sign and failed to book an uber ride
everything is so much messier than i would've liked

i tired of people pleasing, and you never reply
we don't really need to talk about it
i try my best to not really think about it
said that i'm conceited, hedonistic, manipulative

but some nights i just want to drink until i start to lie
see, if coping was a job and paid an hourly wage
i'd be working overtime, id have a career drive
and i'd be a millionaire after six shots, or maybe five

my mom called, i cried by the dhall, on facetime
been thinking about how lucky we are to be alive
even if to deal with mornings and swollen eyes
even if dad's always on the night shift, even with
this big rift caused by the distance and the lack of time
just because we made out once doesn't mean you're mine
i got glimpses of a pink top, my blanket of a jacket
i bet it would look classier if you were wearing it
but you're distant and cold and partying is getting old
i'm forever out of polaroid film and cheap distractions
so i took an amtrak home, straight from south station
the flight back to boston was short but still exhausting
and when i walk home alone, the silence is unsettling
seems we're both better than i thought at method acting

In this room, there is always a fly trying to leave.
It never quite makes it.
It buzzes angily off and on against the glass pane.

Through the window July treetops are a green forgetting of other seasons. Winter is a dream, shrouded in leafy abundance. Spring is a thought of Summer before it came.

On an island in Denmark, you drink white wine.
You are mellow and tipsy, you say.
Hares play in front of you in a field,
They rarely think of leaving
or playing a better game.

i see things in high definition colour, but
july is the only month that fluctuates—
between florida orange and, later, burnt sienna;
everything between the 1st to the 31st
is dipped in a honey-glaze of three things:
1. warm, sticky air
2. the feeling of 6pm
3. bicycles riding through fields of fireflies.

naturally, i spend most of july in my bedroom—
the heat gets to me, makes my allergies flare
and i watch movies; old, 80s, movies (or—tiktok clips
of the same movie, only broken up into thirty-six parts
that i view from my bed with my naked legs spinning vertical circles through the air).

i always forget the feeling of august
until it’s there again. july
overshadows it with the final embers, so i only realise
it's august on maybe the 5th or 6th. almost
a full week into a month that my brain—
which is never wrong about the way things feel—
sees a deep, ocean blue.

i don't write home about august. i don't hurry it up
through winter months, when i begin the countdown
to hot, hazy days. if anything, i view august
as the ending of something, of a summer i wished so hard for.

and every time, it blindsides me with love.

i love things more in august. i love the smell of summer-
rain on the pavement. i love songs i listened to in january.
i love waiting around for halloween. i love my bedroom,
the pause of heat-sick sleep, the blue-sky mornings.

i write love letters to autumn in a time capsule. i text july and ask u up?, and wyd?, and come over?

and still, when summer ends, i will never want to get what i wish for.

Wars and rumors of wars,
plagues and questions of reason

sames we see,
times and seasons, sames we see

reasons to wonder, seasons to think
may be so, maybe otherwise, too;

same as me, and you.
Different almost always, still the same.

I strung up Christmas lights on the trees in my mind
and haven’t taken them down yet.