Summer the seeds spill out of melons, everything’s green and bright yellow, the kids in their neon shirts and with skateboards and kites, the blue sky following them. I want a dress the color of mangos, just as summer begins.
Outdoors, those evenings when no one is ever alone, all of us neighbors. The fireflies lighting up by the window—flickers of words, the names of people we know. Outside there are a thousand rooms under and over the dogwood tree, the leaves growing, hiding gaps.
Rooms, molecules multiply like garden apartments. In summer everything has layers; plum, peach, melon appear like an energy we hadn’t noticed. There’s always someone we miss, even when we are in a group of people, even when we are dancing on an outside patio, and think we are happy. There’s someone we miss.
This summer it rained for days; commuters, we walked through downpours without umbrellas. The rain caught us unaware, like those outbursts, rising from closed suitcases, backpacks, the boxes we left sealed for years because we had not settled. I was looking at photos of her at the beach, several of them—of early mornings with our coffee and bagels, our bag of green grapes. There was a split open box I forgot to tape, to mend.
In summer we can lie on the grass anywhere, look in any circle of blue hydrangea or yellow coreopsis for those souls we’ve lost, those parts which remain in the morning glories’ heavenly blue heights, or gathered and connected across fences, so many nearby, we know their names.
Cathy McArthur (a.k.a. Cathy Palermo) has had poetry, prose, and translations published in Juked, Pilgrimage, Ping Pong, Barrow Street, The Bellevue Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Blue Fifth Review, among others. She teaches creative writing and composition at The City College of New York, where she received her M.F.A. in poetry and The Malanche Award for her translations of Latin American poetry.