Serotinal: A Series
“The rain will eventually come, or not.
Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—
The war never ended and somehow begins again.”
Natalie Diaz
“Love is a form of heat, really.”
Etel Adnan
To summer is to picnic, but what picks, what nicks? Outside, sunlight nips skin as if tiny mosquitos expiring. Through trees’ limbs, tines of light bite us. Cicadas sting air. All year you and I have been free of heat, but now we cannot stand sky’s teeth. Sun’s incisors nibbling, we pick up our blanket: flee. The birds leap from the trees, screech: We don’t want you here. Preach: Piquenique, oh là là! To peck at a worthless thing.
Nighttime brings no release: at twilight we wake, sweating, to every cell stretching. Blink—the pothos has colonized the ceiling. Kiss—the cabbage: a subaltern napping. Noxious, monstrous, even our bodies grow without our according. Fingernails: sickled into the sink. Abdomens: ovened. Oh, how invasion is brazen, shameless: of course, there is love, but also, other things. So grows the fruit but so too the weeds.
The relief of a drought breaking is doing a pee in a pool, switched: slow cool entering water’s warmth. Outside, sky’s nitrogen fertilizes us. Dots us with ammonia till we mottle. Prisms us till we glint. All afternoon we wink, sipping sky’s chilled liquor, flicking at each other alchemist’s mix. For when you’ve been deprived of ichor for a season, the first thing to do is cup your hands and drink.
A storm is a joke whose punchline hits the earth. In the distance, thunder’s chuckle enters the evening. Lightning stretches its grin, taps a tree: runs—but that doesn’t mean outside has all the fun. In the apartment, you gas the lights and stoke the stove, while I grease up the fridge. Tickle the mixer. Fall about giggling at kettle’s din. The only way to survive a quarantine is to bring your kin within.
When storms lose their affinities, one finds glee in other chemistries. On the balcony we lie stunned by night’s matrix. Count the phosphorus of thousands now winter's dust: this star once a crustacean’s eye, a woolly mammoth, a foremother, a sow’s spine. All night sky’s sodium shakes down so we wake coated in soft, vacant light. They say some stars are already dead, but in the spurn of summer, what is dead is what gives us life.
Also: life can give life. All summer bees came, striped copters at the window. I gave them my body and they gave me bellies heavy with honey, touching tiny lips to mine, as if I too were something to be cared for, something delicate to be passed from mouth to mouth. Siphoning flowers’ spit, they stroked me with their spikes before flying off to die. Bee-sucked, bee-kissed, hum-struck, buzz-bit: what does it mean to be strummed by hundreds of tiny things? To be stung constantly with love and all that it brings.
When swelter brings no rest, sometimes you have to preserve excess. In the kitchen we jam sun’s sourness into jellies. Pickle the sink. Spoon the room. Screw jars with the sound of a lolly unglued from a mouth. Heat canned into confectionery, we open windows: soothed. But why wait for winter to chow? Unwrapping sun’s sugar, we liberate tins, lick every pip until our pulses tickle with sucrose’s roar. Don’t tell me while the world burns we should save sweet’s spoils: sharing is something no person should hoard.
At fever’s peak: what’s left to do but eat it? Defeated, you turn your back to estivate, cloaked in torpor. The movement of your blood: slow. Your heartbeat: slow, so slow you could be dead, you who love only the gentle. Desiccated, I dry alongside you as you cocoon through the most oppressive month. For surrender doesn’t always look like the ground breaking—sometimes it’s as omniscient as air, and you can’t breathe without feeling as if opening your mouth would let it all in, and you would drown.
Dog days I act the canicular: pace in circles, pee on the carpet, throw up dinner, leave hair in tiny tufts, hump the furniture, zoom the room, and chase my own tail, mad with loneliness. Nights I bark at the star rising heliacal, waiting for other hounds’ howls that never come. Mornings I recline on tarmac: hating humidity, its calamitous cling. At dusk I align beside you, bringing the only organ that can bear ardor—my nose—to yours. A dog is born to be with her lover; a dog is not capable of being alone.
Serotinal at last, blooms suicide from roof height, fling themselves from window sills, as I slink along nirvana’s bruise. In the garden, hues blend, leaving rot’s singular soil: the spoil. The season receding, I think of how this is an appropriate end: for in rest, who wants to be disparate? Who wants the blazing separation of shades? Not I, who, alone will step into the unknotting, the clots of color becoming one, to meld with earth, its monochromatic hue. No, not I, who until more tender weather—for all climes descend—will coalesce, yes, together, with you.
