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.