SUSAN AIZENBERG
HEAT
This isn’t, I swear,
another love poem, though I confess
I’m feeling sultry
as an Alabama belle. This heat—
102 degrees for days, for weeks
no rain, air so heavy
with its need to pour
paper on my desk curls, damp.
Enervating as the Santa Ana
in some noir film, wind
fevers the trees, the black
and white moment
just before some grade-B
actor, sweating through his sharkskin
jacket, is strangled
or shot, or the tough-guy
detective sets his shot glass,
rim sweating, too,
on the bar to order another.
It’s the wind that knocks wildly
against the kitchen window
as he makes love to a rich
man’s wife—red nails, gold ankle
bracelet—on a blessedly
cool tile floor. At my desk,
I move in slow motion, clothes
sticking. And yes, when
I press its matte surface
to my face, your photo cools my skin.
We’d be like those lovers,
deaf to the prelude
of sirens, her husband’s
key in the lock.
