Flying Island

your summer at fernwood by Jeffrey Owen Pearson because men were forbidden in your room we camped deep in the hardwoods where two streams slipped into one it always rained and skin stuck to skin in a glorious sweat you joked every time I came the blankets were a tent and you need bring no poles at first light when we walked among the wild bergamot and prairie blazing stars hummingbirds suckled near your breasts late summer the rocket grass fired red like a beautiful disaster Bio: Jeffrey Owen Pearson’s poems appear in So It Goes, Reckless Writing Anthology, Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island and Maize. His chapbook Hawaii Slides was published by Pudding House Publications. A member of the Midwest Writers Workshop, he lives in Muncie.

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Mortality by Anne Haines It was the hottest summer anyone could remember. I know Texans laugh at twenty, twenty-one days of ninety but some afternoons the air was so thick with humidity you could have spread it on a birthday cake. Animals died at the county fair, the grand champion hog smothered in his own incipient bacon, lambs panting behind the lemon shake-up stand. Even my sunflowers, bobbing and weaving in the front yard like stunned prizefighters, let their leaves wither, collapse like old women’s hands that have given up on prayer. Seasons like that, everything feels like a warning. And when the nights are no relief, the dark air limp and lowering, we lie as still as possible in separate beds listening to the dense hum of crickets, listening past them to the distant yip of a coyote, past that to the slow machine of weather churning in the distance, in the moonlight’s steam, in the unavoidable swelter of August’s ...