By Elton Glaser

Featured Art by Mike Miller

The heat’s so bad the lilies put out a limp perfume
And the chipmunks sag through their holes
Like a bridge-and-tunnel crowd on their wasted way home.

I’m listening to the bees in the summer garden, their big
Furry bottoms striped like rugby shirts,
A scrum humming some sad doo-wop in the flower wombs.

I’ve been stuck for weeks in a house of grief and cable TV
And a dozen kinds of condiment,
And I’m feeling a little hemmed in, all funky and stirred up.

Soon there’ll be a sunset like an oozing wound, and then
A moon in the crotch of the dogwood tree.
In this wreckage of hours, what now can I do?

Not even weeping Jesus with a bush hog
And a weed wacker
Could push this earth around and make it work.

I’d save myself and others in their own worse way,
But words won’t do it when there’s
Nothing inside the fortune cookies but suicide notes.

---

Elton Glaser has published eight full-length collections of poetry. His new book is Ghost Variations, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.