Summer Break

In your eyes, there is my summer. Your nights

are by our city drive and your day celebrates

its mirror. From time to time, a memory sneaks out

between your laughter, leaving us right where we left off —

in the playground swings, our dreams finding parity.

I am not a wanderer nor a resident of your

marigold summers. I am the one who once was myself,

each year waiting, for a night out

bumming indie car classics, at the forms of

heart station yelling our lungs out.

And all of you is your summer … brilliant summer

like those grassy eyes, summer as subtle

as the promises we spoke, the more lucid they became.

We’d grown to embrace the ice cream chills, undulating within me

numbed like a cat’s languor. There, I grew more apprehensive of a future held tight in the grasp of the little freedoms, gazing at its own certainty, confident in its

daydreams, nothing lauds it except its reflection.

And by then, we too were lost. Your afternoons were steeped

in the plays of our games. Every inhalation is a whisper of recollection, when

we had chased those same experiences for their recital, existing in the echoes

of each other's breaths.