Frantic voices in a neighbor’s back yard –

Young and laughing and loud, drawing breath into tender lungs,

Exhaled mist resounding celebration,

Some small victory, earned in observation.

Familiar the sound of the new season,

Another reminder of how we’re always coming back around

To where we started.

Under another salmon sky, Wednesday afternoon,

Smoke sits shoulder-height,

Introducing and concluding itself in a wash of artificial light,

Bullying and loud.

Tags on and all, and

Imbued with the scent of fresh figs, (reflective fabric clinging still),

The breeze sneaks in to play in the kitchen,

and now others smell the stove’s sizzling attire.

my biggest fear

is that someday I’ll wake up

having forgotten all my internet passwords

and my PIN

standing front of the automated teller,

my face glazed in embarrassment

what will the people in line behind me think?

Working on Sunday

The night’s first drink, mixed with jackets and gloves unremoved,

sings with ice and glass in tonight’s most steady rhythm.

The empty house, with its tense occupation and ever-struggling furnace,

captures the traveller in its familiar atmosphere, like the protective figure of

a young man’s fantasy.

Two clicks and a light comes on.

Condensation-slick hands reach for the telephone, a reproduction of an old rotary in clunky red plastic.

Chilled water drops on the carpet.

The river, down the hill behind the steep backyard,

flows unnaturally, in different directions at different times of the year.

A pot of spring water boils on the electric stove, wetness on the pot’s bottom

sizzling against the worn black coils awakening.

The slowest of the four burners.

The radio.

Miller hits a three.

Sonny Clark spills his drink on the keys.

…boiling water begins to overflow.