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Summer Haibun

To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air

the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light

May

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

This is a love poem. It has no business.

It happens in that anyway world

Where the bodies are by now decided

To get all the way up, accompanied

By changes in temperature and light

Welcome and unwelcome both,

Lie down, get up, go prone again,

Get nowhere in time. I won’t

Reduce to a single preposition

A relation to the one person about it

Like grass. Who has a pronoun, a name,

Three or four even, which globe,

Without containing, her experience,

Of which I chase awareness till

Her letters are with one exception

All over this deepening sheet, name-

Blind blue of a cloudless day.

Unconcerned with property disputes,

The poem gradually permits itself

To figure grass, the blue of the sky

Because we see those first kinds

Of immense quiet as sleepers

While walking the dog in the hills

And store them for future use

As simile and metaphor, each

ancient and suspiciously free

Of present disaster. But today royally is

Blue and cloudless, this blue, this

Unironic absence of clouds over green

That makes you temporarily more

Intelligent, makes time harder to track

Until it seems it’s always been

Only this pleasure somewhere

Between hours in the form of a bell

Melting mid-ring. The poem’s now

Broken one of its rules in order

To keep ringing. Because I want to

Be smarter than true it continues

To disobey the trace of my injuries,

Remembering home is not a place

One at all leaves or gets to

But supremely anonymous

Relations with rhythm, a fragrance

Where skin meets time on which

No pronouns fall, here in the presence of.

Not lasting but repeatable and

Each of the instances claimed

For the series, belonging with the ones

That came before it, the others

Still to come but not in doubt,

Yesterday moving on top of tomorrow.

If blue were an all-day affair work

Didn’t tear us apart in, but held

As shape and song, the anonymous one

Playing on repeat, referencing nothing but

The very red distraction I attend to

Where bed turns each afternoon away

Along the suede sound of good decay

There’s still plenty of time to invent,

None of it spent in advance, then,

In intuition of every day to come,

The flowers lasting for more than a week,

Blue growing down to grass,

It would be like this.

I Didn’t Know

Circe Maia

^{translated from the Spanish by}^{Jesse Lee Kercheval}

I didn’t know it had rained,
and suddenly, stepping out into the street,
I found water on the leaves
and the asphalt wet and shining.
The paving stones washed clean and white
and the air light and so very clear.
Did no one see it fall?
Did no one see it?

No sabía

No sabía que había llovido
y de pronto, al salir a la calle
me encontré con el agua en las hojas
y el asfalto mojado y brillante.
Las baldosas lavadas y blancas
y liviano y clarísimo el aire.
¿Nadie la vio caer?
¿No la vio nadie?