I open the window at 2 a.m.
and the air tastes like my grandmother’s restlessness,
lavender and Snapple Peach Iced Tea and
the coarse salt on the counter I’d sneak under
my tongue with a finger perfumed from magazines.
I don’t know if the sirens outside
are chasing someone
or warning us of heat again.
Every July feels like it’s bruising forward,
like the earth has a fever,
I keep pressing my palm to her forehead,
are you okay?
will you be okay?
Once, love was tomatoes ripening on a vine.
Now it’s the absence of rain,
a mirage crawling on its hands and knees,
a silence fattened into cruelty,
a river shrinking in a photograph
I can’t delete.
My body remembers
every humid afternoon,
swollen sky pregnant with nothing,
gasoline rainbow choking in the gutter,
texts I let rot in the blue light,
every ancestor who walked into smoke.
I want to believe the light is still holy,
but it smells like her kitchen burning.
Last night I dreamed of sparrows
falling mid-flight,
their wings charred into silence.
The cardinals keep coming,
arterial across the branches,
each one a flare gun aimed at the future.
And I woke laughing
not because it was funny,
but because irony
was the last mouth left open.