August one late rain-dark all lingering water pulled heavy
to the ground, familiar and rundown hill to harbor so later
rising light meets air conscience cleared, simple fix, fizz or
one easy air is pleasure wrung out, is all morning was
yellower, recasting local hotel gutted brick, to be recast
like a film clear pressed just, scrolled, pushed up black nail
crescent crests above the bed, pink, above the finger pad,
that easy ominous oval, a warning point. Don’t come
here. Change your life. Exchange for gothic, some deader.
But hovering at the cornerstone, bluish metal finally
cooled overnight, blush swamp . receded, dry, one
pleasure before the heat-dome recloses, smothers rising
dusky, steamy sleeping in the park then, before morning.
The every-heron settles across the way on a detached pier
overgrown with grasses and goldenrod and streaks of rot,
stands still in institutionalized mini-island limbo. Such a
willful little park with fisher bird, cut off like an
inaccessible idea rooted floating, rooted inaccessible, and
a name, a reason, a word: I love you, you are safe.
Originally from the Hudson Valley in New York, Thea Brown is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Recent poems can be found in Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Oversound, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook We Are Fantastic (Petri Press 2013) and the full-length collection Think of the Danger (H_NGM_N 2016). She lives in Baltimore, where she was the 2016–2017 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School, a 2016 Rubys Artist Project Grant awardee, and the recipient of a 2017 UCross Foundation fellowship.