Bugbitten and peeling, red skin,
wrinkled clothes stuffed in suitcases,
drinking from garden faucets and
running through your neighbor’s sprinklers.

A heat that cooks you from the inside,
leaves you all decay
lying beneath a lazy,
buzzing ceiling fan.

In the warm stillness
a ray of sun catches the dust
spinning, falling slowly.

Hopscotch. Doubledutch. Chalked pink fingers.

I wish I remembered more.
The dust as it falls in the darkness.
The dust just before it hits the ground.

Hazy desert skies,
forlorn orange, teal and starless,
every cloud in tangerine lines.

One earbud in your ear, the other in mine.

I think I’ve become the dust
caught spinning within a sunbeam.

Moths hitting against the window,
cicadas singing outside,
a reminder of the world still breathing in the darkness.

I will always think of those summers and think of you.