Night Walk by KA Webb
Let’s get summer drunk:
jump yellow hydrants
pick strangers’ hydrangeas
sync our limbs choreographic.
Let’s make-believe it’s kindergarten.
Sneak beneath a garden wall & nap in fertile dirt.
Let’s climb the city’s oldest tree.
Teach me to swing.
I’ll teach you to read.
We’re all human, so.
It’s so humid.
Wipe the sweat from my nose.
Someday we’ll miss this.
Me, hair full of thistles.
You, mouth a’glimmer.
Tonight, smokestacks recite poetry that never dies.
Tonight, let’s pollute the sky with smoldering ghosts.
I’m on fire.
You’re my sticks & flame & friction.
I burn like a barbecue pig roast blackened
like Bessemer factories. I burn orange
like the skyscrapers scratching at the gray abyss.
In cars circling the park, there are men
waiting to devour one another
like vultures, so fucking lusty—no,
lonely. The dead, so damn romantic.
A panting dog, tail arrowed at the hidden stars.
KA Webb is the founder of the Nitty-Gritty Magic City Reading Series in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned an MFA from UNC-Wilmington. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, PANK, The Bitter Southerner, Arts & Letters, North American Review, and PMS poemmemoirstory, among others.
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