I wear the season as a skin and know that I’m inhabited
by myself and a growth, or some feeling of growth.
I write poems for myself, read them, write them over again.
I listen to carefully selected songs on repeat.
Summer passes like ginger ale, which I’ve never tasted,
ice-cube after ice-cube melts against my stomach and slides.
I tell everyone that I am resting. I hate resting and want it taught me.
Going to the sea is something; a kingdom’s worth of seaweed -
foot after foot running across the sand - all I’d ever learnt.
When I talk to friends, I feel like doing it on an old telephone,
so I can twirl out the cord and touch the distance between us.
I keep displacing things but they find their way back again.
Later, I am lying on my bed at the thrown-across angle
of the heat, and I am thinking some familiar thought
which requires little effort, feeling my skin grow so quick it splits.
Maya Little
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