Heat Wave
I’m writing to you from a summer rainstorm. I’ve kept one of my windows open so that I can smell the petrichor and hear the thunder and lightning and car tires on wet pavement. I love a good soaking and we need it to wash out some of the heat that has held us close and tight for the last while.
Lately, I’m rising at least an hour earlier than usual to water my plants and deadhead my flowers. These are not chores to me because they lend pleasure and shape to my summer days.
Then I sit at my desk and become a puddle. Then a pond.
Hours later, and most often alone, I go for a swim and think about how sexy the water is. To dive and surface and be made new.
Home again, I brew another big jar of peach tea and make more ice cubes. I eat sandwiches and watermelon for every meal, or else I don’t eat. Too hot. I walk around in next to nothing with all of the lights off in the house and when my sweetheart reaches for me I ask him to wait until the temperature drops at least 20 degrees. We touch anyway. Of course we do.
All night I dream I am somewhere low lit, slick and salty, dancing to a Haitian band in a basement nightclub that might be in Philadelphia, circa 2002. The air conditioner can’t keep up with us.
We dance for hours and leave together. Every surface glistens.
I’ve had an unusual season in that I’ve taken an intentional break from writing every single morning, as I have done for so many years. Instead, I let it arise unbeckoned, unbidden. It's always there—in the way I move through the day. The way I see and hear and smell and feel.
I am drifting in the July tide, inundated and overcome. When all of the wires are wet and the bushings are shot and this sinking feeling, this blurry world, this higher than average heat index might just continue into the hot future, a poem is something that floats. I get inside and row, row, row.
—Holly Wren Spaulding, August 2022