That year, in Hardy country, the rot bloomed:
The wild blackberries hanged themselves in the hedgerows,
Blistered, blackened,
fat, swollen,
dead, aching, over-ripe.
All the seams of summer had burst,
the whole county was sick with it,
a diaphanous, bristling heat,
that nestled and struck.
It struck us,
the sun-seared, sun-sloshed, sun-sly,
Skin peeled, snake children
Riotous, dedicated to the revelry of our becoming.
Those strange, slothful, dog-days
were an end to the nosebleed years,
an unspoken crossing-over:
I remember those men,
who looked at us like cats in a drought.
Meadowsweet by Hannah Durham (Lucent Dreaming Issue 9)
“Now, he notices only my absence, the things I have not done: a thin layer of dust in the hallway, an unprepared meal in the pantry. I’ve started abandoning tasks just to see if he notices, the calculated neglect like a beam from a distant lighthouse.”
