The back-splash tiling has begun, but now Tom has to go back to work, so the kitchen will be in purgatory for the week. I'd take photos of the half-finished project, but the blue painter's tape protecting the counters looks really terrible against the color of the new tile, and you wouldn't enjoy what you were looking at.

Today I'll be back to editing, and talking about Blake with Teresa, and trying to deal with the weekend's postponed housework-plus-construction dirt. It's cool outside--only 50 degrees--and September begins tomorrow. I'm beginning to imagine frost and fried green tomatoes.

Here's a poem, a little elegy for summer--

August 

 

Dawn Potter

 

sugar maples green as monsters           burdocks 6 feet high in the ditches

every weed exploding faster than harleys & you

 

skating that loaded hay truck up the gravel mountain            baring your teeth

at devils           while I gobbled klondike bars like

pot roast on thanksgiving

 

o it was all similes and metaphors in those days          drunken

farmhands luring us into the sheep shed        peanutbutternwhitebread

3 meals a day               the stars they bit holes into the night sky 

 

truelove reeked of cowshit & milk      & we never learnt any better no no we’re still

spilling out of our ragged skin

[first published in Hole in the Head Review (Summer 2020)]