Summer Wallow

Laura Zhang

it’s too hot for this you said as you pulled down your boxers and touched more of the earth. water holding up your smile, in that blue-green.

i told you when i was little my dog died and she loved the river. for some reason it reminded you of being shorter in the morning time.

that night when we heard coyote howls we took loose leaf paper and crumpled the sound– everything, falling through we loved phoebe who sang: You are sick, and you’re married/ And you might be dying/ But you’re holding me like water in your hands to us in a shadowless cave. that burning day i saw a pig breathing in a mudhole and hoped soon i would have a soft body. it’s so much bluer at the bottom– where i joined you at the tip of a cliff, wiped the spit from your burnt shoulder and jumped. when does rain become rain again? when you splashed i felt the water in my eyes melting like a sun shower and thought i’d like to stay. under water cliffs are not cliffs but hands holding each other. we were so dirty in mud and looking for color you, burning the three page letter from your father at the campsite. our backs held to our backpacks, lukewarm. yesterday, like a summer swallow. like leftover lip marks in the clear, in sky under the half moon lightbulb.