Heatwaves in spring,

deathfalls in autumn marathons.

I fry eggplant in its skin,

baked again with tomato, breaking down

to a bloody, slimy thing served cold with bread.

City policy: the only guaranteed air conditioning

is a morgue, the humming trailers

keeping bodies unslimed.

Move too much, you’ll

be blamed for your death.

Too much stimulation by day, too much

cortisol with morning. I dream of dark

hot night, a lover I never made love to.

The humid sun wakes me out of strangled fishnet

covering their chest. The light

more disruptive than the heat, that sweaty warmth

I crawl back to in place of another body.

What if wet n wild

started running ads on climate change?

Manufactured the sky’s chemical kaleidoscope

into an eye palette. Turned the ocean to

seltzer, canned this salt soda of last resort

while fascists feed fresh water to machines.

Spewed black death to air. Permafrost bodies

don’t know the plagues they release upon melting.

Our bloods’ fever is barely over

the threshold where fungi thrive, a barrier held

since nature selected mammals over dinosaurs,

when the asteroid made an earth with no sun.

Desiccated land expands death dunes

men cross when they try to flee

the death camps built by men.

The dead don’t lay in the street to be walked over.

May they haunt us, forever. May we honor

their haunting, letting there be space

for what is to come, to really come

for what is possible to last, to last

if bracing, and be enough.