Heat Wave

by Dan Leach

Then came the summer
the ponds went dry
and everyone’s grass turned
the color of bone.
Streets became graveyards
and even the pool
with its pale green promise
yawned in the distance
like a forgotten church.

The world moved inside.

It is hard to live
in the gap between
what you once had
and what you now want.

But the man on the TV
said not to worry,
all weather is temporary.

The man said one day
we would wake up
and the world we knew
would be right where
it had always been.

We believed him
and found ways to survive.
We ate banana popsicles
and napped under fans.
We killed time
with all the books
we’d never read.
We became the experts
in the art of waiting.

For a while waiting
feels like waiting.
Then it feels like living.

We did everything
we were supposed to do,
but the heat refused to leave.
The heat got hotter.
It stayed for weeks
then it stayed for years.
The man on the TV
who was wrong
about everything
got replaced by another
man who said some
weather is permanent.

Now this is how we live.

Now we limp from room to room,
such fractious little pilgrims.

Now we try to remember
a sun that would burn us
but also let us breathe.

Dan Leach has published work in The New Orleans Review, Copper Nickel, and The Sun. He has two collections of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident Press, 2022). His poetry collection Stray Latitudes won Texas Review Press’s 2023 Southern Poetry Prize and will be released next spring.