This is the full silver coin of the sun, blaring like an air horn.
This is the heat that bleaches every thread.
This is the humidity: sour, teenage feet.
This is the scuttle of cloud cover, geometries of insouciance and innocence.
This is the lightening siren, shrill harbinger for human resources.
This is the prismatic wind that nets coconuts, kicks off the palm fronds.
This is the downpour, drenching your faith in the day.
This is the puddle that soaks the stamens of your shoes, the unsightly blossom of the
umbrella turned inside out.
This is the mud in the marsh of your car. You cool like cookies, hardening with time.
This is the shivering of the whistle, the end of rain delay.
These are the greening rays of the waning afternoon, steaming wrinkles from the field.
This is the play
after play
after play,
cutting loose the wild from the cultivated,
reminding you of all you once had to lose.
Jen Karetnick is the author of seven poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, 2016). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Evansville Review, Negative Capability, One, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Spillway and Verse Daily.