Three weeks and the air still smells
like sulfur and explosions, the sky
hazy lavender, heat rising wavy

from the pavement as the sun sinks
a molten apricot, the swelter jam-thick
dense enough to scoop in my hands,

to smear warm across a whole summer
like crushed blackberries, even as
the season drains, like cold sweat down

the hollow of my spine— more water
lost beneath an overpass. The road
at sunset so flat and level, it resembles

the shore’s view of the horizon—
a line unreachable across a vast blue. I
almost forget, sometimes, that the line

doesn’t exist, has never existed in my life. I
wanted to go there so badly, as a child, to that
away. I wanted every impossibility:

apologies and admissions of hurt. Decades
later, I finally know better. Sometimes, you
swim away from what you love,

because you know it will never be real.
The calm heat builds, breaks to thunderclap.
Rain pours its rumbling into my ear.

For too long, I waited as if some message
was coming, for apologies, for liars to die before
I could speak the truth. If the city flooded,

tonight, I would swim out through the dark,
and break the horizon like a thread.