Summer City
In my damp inseam, the weather creases low and smooth.
Down the back and underneath the levy of legs. Tender
is the escape of water & salt—I jury to this known monument.
The camera washes the window, pushes the sheer orange
curtain away. In effect, it creates this timeline. That
I am currently a part of, like a lonely spider. It strikes.
There are these exhausting trips from
here to there: wasted time & the feeling
that everything is just the way it’s supposed to be.
You haven’t lived up to anything
and You haven’t lived at all.
Cursing dumb decisions like a plate of bad food
& then suddenly,
the begging silence
of how everything is now,
in this exact moment it appeared to me.
But, it goes cold and hardens.
It’s just a reminder:
every sentence is an ending and it is not.
There’s another sentence expected after it.
Copyright © 2026 by travis l. tate. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 22, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is me trying to express the way the heat of summer creates a beautiful kind of eroticism. The heat, the potential of elongated pleasure in the face of time moving forward and seasons changing. There seems to be this unbridled joy and, at the same time, a small fear that the furious joy will be lost. That sudden dark feeling that wraps around you as the party is ending. But it’s important to remind yourself that joy starts at the beginning of all things.”
—travis l. tate
travis l. tate
