Summer Heat

Hot stuff, lemme ask you

One more question

You don’t know the answer to:

When I see our mutual friends,

Do you disappear

Because you feel yourself

Starting to faint again,

Because your respect and disgust for me

Compels you

To leave me well enough alone,

Or because you run from the sight

Of a humanely-killed animal?

A deer bludgeoned by a car

Will stay haplessly half-dead for quite a while

Soft and limp,

But once you shoot it, sweet blood

Seeps and slides and splatters.

And I guess I never told you

I made a pact with God

That anything that breaks me

Please does it quickly

So I can pardon your vile departure

Because I guess I got what I wanted.

I stuck my fingers in your mouth

In a Catholic church parking lot

And told you I wouldn’t cross the line

For a premature taste of the divine

But you denied any holy touch of mine

You fogged up all the car windows

Pouring hot breath in my ear

Everything got so moist

The mold grew back on the carpet.

My chronically ill self

Always runs a fever

And with a soul so on fire

And a body “so fucking hot”

If you hadn’t fled from our humid little fling

The alive you’d touched into me

Would have begun to protest

While I suffocated

Because young love

Is a necessary claustrophobia

So long as it’s temporary

I always run a fever, you hate

Religious fervor

So summer heat is when I sleep

It’s when you run in circles.

Now it’s summer heat and I’m in heat

You’re drinking with Abandon.

I just want fun in scorching sun

I darn socks and damn your name

Summer heat is when I sleep

It’s when you run

In circles.

And call little people slurs

And call grown-up women girls

Keep drinking with Abandon,

Sweetie, keep running

With Abandon.

Give your mother my regards.

Matylda M. Biskupska is an early-twenties poet based out of Connecticut. She has an existential crisis approximately every seven minutes, and writing is her catharsis. More of her work can be found in _Adolescent Voices_.