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.

 
(Front page image via)

Other things you might want to read:

Walk of No Shame by Randall Mann Underlife & Portico Release Party/Reading! Julie Baber’s Not Quite Stars My Long and Tearless Night by Meghan Lamb