Two poems by Adam D. Weeks

Kangaroo Rain

“Step outside and the air is a weight you bear.” –Catherine Pierce

We used to play in an empty

swimming pool, skin on cement

and nothing to keep us afloat. Remember

the whispered enemies kept between you, me

and the diving rock, the lights that blued

beneath our feet before the water

came. We weren’t scared of the deep

yet, below all that stone and piping, mending

our skinned knees together. The rain gave way

to our camp and washed the mud from our boots, filling

us over the burgundy edge. We wore the wind like camouflage,

heavy on our shoulders as we swam free

from the burning high tide. The water didn’t take

our battlements or soak our cardboard canopy—even the storm fell

off our ramparts, over with the runoff, the moat

around our forged fortress. Those days we bathed

in nothing but the sun, our toes treading

everything between concrete and brackish.

Letter to a Floating Piano

For Molly McCully Brown

Imagine something lovelier,

if you could, sweeter

than the other or the storm

or the dove you can carry

in your mouth without causing

a bruise. Boy taken and smeared

along a dirt road, smattered, girl buried

in snow and another buried in her

hair. You said if I swallowed

enough wings I’d feel lighter

than everything in my stomach.

You said we’d be the same, girl

with her fist in her mouth, boy who bites. The only way to talk

about pain is this: girl as a gas-lit

coal, boy as a self-

inflicted burn.
 

Adam D. Weeks is a junior undergraduate student studying creative writing at Salisbury University. He has poems published in Asterism and a poem forthcoming in Prairie Margins. He also has a fiction piece published in The Scarab.