Summer Contours
By Allison Davis
Grass: a wet-ink alphabet
crystallized under nectar. Perimeters crack with apricots
& figs. Birds rustle thick in almond
branches, chirping roughly
at eye-level. A man reads
the paper on the patio. He goes to close the windows
but stops. Before him, his wife
hangs laundry, clothespins tight between her
teeth, her grandmother’s tablecloth
flung across the line.
Waving, she gathers it
warm around her shoulders.
His eyes sink to her feet, reading subtitles
below her in the grass.
The newsprint scrapes up his yellow blood.
Last night, he looked down the line
of backyards as the moon
must: tree-lined rectangles
of wet grass. The leaves, razor sharp
in the morning, broadened
like pupils in the dark.
This was fine. It was the crickets,
so insistent he looked up
what they were saying: come to me,
stay, fuck me, fuck off.
His hand drops from the window.
Wind knocks branches against
the screens, shadows shake
like insects across the headlines.
Closed, his eyes fill with
flowers bigger than ostrich eggs,
moon-bright. He looks at her ankles, his neckties
hanging still, blacker than a killer’s shoes
& more harmonic.
Allison Davis is a graduate student in Ohio. Her work has appeared in the Cincinnati magazine Milk Money. She enjoys reading Greek tragedy and selling beer at her father’s trucking motel.
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