The air was thick as clotted cream, felt curdled and
pregnant with wet heat. While white and stacked grey clouds
weighted down until pushed themselves into fog,
it was mist.
As hot as it gets, they said, this is it, the tops it can get.
An inferno.
The hottest it has been yet.
A lone human in the dark morning,
no cool breeze finds me, sultry summer lingers
at the front door, breathing heavy, loitering across
the eggplant sky, hanging on with bruises.
Eighty-six
degrees at three a.m.
nothing moved but magma waves
hiss and ess. Yes,
this is the sound eighty-sixed.
Finally, at six, three more hours
the sky cracked, the wind awoke, stirred
and whisked the steam into lemon meringue.
Now the brown edges protrude.
The silence dissolved like refined sugar,
and moments filled with birds and their wings.
Painting by Ercole de' Roberti [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
