The Work
Summer is a ritual of endurance. The way rain rewinds into haze no color cuts through. Even the tiger lilies surrounding the supermarket parking lot are washed out, mute. Today’s forecast: suffocation. You have to strain to catch the signal that ignites the voice flowering beyond the brain — a language you hardly know as your own, but it is yours. You stand outside the poem, tend to its edges. Worry the seams. Keep it from collapsing. This is the work you’ve been given. A power line in the fog, sloping toward infinity.