These excerpts from the six poems below will delight your summer senses before the sun goes down in a few months. There are romance scenarios set by the Hudson River and lots of beer on the fire escapes and city fireflies. Summer Night, Riverside by Sara Teasdale In the wild soft summer darkness The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky. And now, far off Soon the City by Liam Rector Soon the summer Now the pleasant purgatory Of spring is over, Soon the choking Humidity In the city On the fire escapes In a sleeveless T-shirt Smoking a cigar In tune with the tremor Of the mindless yellow Commercial traffic Moving in the city, Where no one really Buys a car, American Or otherwise, Where we will, As Rilke said we would Where we will Wake, read, write Long letters And in the avenues Wander restlessly To and fro On foot in The humidity, Where soon I’ll shower, dress, Take the dog out for a piss, And mail this. Chinatown Diptych by Jenny Xie I. The face of Chinatown returns its color, plucked from July’s industrial steamer. …Four noodle shops on East Broadway release their belches collectively. They breed in e a hankering for family life. Hey, there’s no logic to melons and spring onions exchanging hands. No rhythm to men’s briefs clothes-pinned to the fire escape. Retirees beneath the Manhattan Bridge leak hearsay. The woman in Apartment #18 on Bayard washes her feet in pot of boiled water each evening before bedtime. But every handful of weeks she lapses. I lean into the throat of summer. Perched above these streets with whom I share verbs and adjectives. II. Faces knotted, bangs softened with grease. The East River pulls along a thread of sun. While Sunday slides in. Again, in those plain trousers. How the heat is driven off course. How one can make out the clarified vowels of bridges. Who’s keeping count of what’s given against what’s stolen? There’s nothing I can’t trace back to my coarse immigrant blood. Uncles tipple wine on the streets of Mott and Bayard. Night shifts meet day shifts in passing. Sweat seasons the body that labors. And in each noodle shop, bowls dusted with salt. Morningside Heights, July by William Matthews Haze…A clatter of jackhammers. Granular light. A film of sweat for primer and the heat for a coat of paint. A man and a woman on a bench: she tells him he must be psychic, for how else could he sense, even before she knew, that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle on the boil… The sky blurs – there’s a storm coming up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly around a corner. How familiar it feels to feel strange, hollower than a bassoon. A rill of chill air in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail. First Blues by Saundra Rose Maley That summer night Was hot Steaming like a crab Luscious under the shell Television gone bleary Blinked In front of men In undershirts drinking beer Wives upstairs took showers Caught A glimpse of their backs In hallway mirrors I sat in the dark Invisible On the back porch Drinking in the night And it tasted good So good Going down And somebody like me Blew night through an alto sax Blew and blew His cooling breath His hot cool breath on me – And I came alive Glowing In the dark Listening like a fool 40 Ounce by Marcus Jackson Summer has salted our neighborhood to thirst; tar that patches the wounds of roofs heats to sluggish bubbles; sun obligates paint on car hoods to blotch. Emphasized by the light inside corner-store beer cooler, your malt lusters. Your cold gold down throat. Foam-skinned as any cleansing. Through an uncurtained pane, a music video is visible; women’s shimmer slurs like jewelry worn on a passerby. We drink you to the pale bottom, we drink until night sinks into skin like silk, until graveyard cops circle our block like a clock arm, until blood slides like alloy through veins, until words hammer from the anvil of the brain, until America’s continental wheel unbolts and everybody can see we gleam like greased bearings.
