The Trouble with Summer
- May 18, 2022
- 1 min read
by Despy Boutris
is it takes away your excuse to bundle up and stay in bed. Sure, around here,
even winters feel like summers, but it’s the rain that’s the real savior:
the excuse to stay in, to avoid friends, to avoid your mother diagnosing you
with dysthymia again. Once upon a time, summer was the first beat of the drum,
the drop of the bass. Now it’s your life T-boned by another season, your hands
fashioning a noose in sleep. It’s your skin turned dry and scaled with the absence
of lips christening you theirs, your mouth cooling like a bomb crater. In front of you,
the sun unfurls its light over the fields, the sky a clear blue, denying all your bruises.
Despy Boutris’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Guernica, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.
