300(ish) Words on Summer Ending
Unlike all of the pop stars soaked in aquamarine and cat-eyed girls, summer isn’t my favorite season. But it is the song that gets stuck in my head year-round. Spinning heat lunacies blare through the mesh of my neurons. June and her green shadows prance through the mansion of my head across the following months. I remember July with a peculiar fondness as the first fleet of delicate snow descends in swift, delicate hoards. August is the poem I memorize most clearly, every line-break staining the roof of my mouth. Each summer is clearly defined in my mind. The summer of 2019 was the summer of losing my sister and purple cough syrup and heart-shaped earrings. The summer of 2020 was the lines at the supermarket and sleeping on the floor. This summer is no different. As fall bleeds into the forefront with her lush trimmings, I can feel this summer crystallizing among the others like the smallest Russian nesting doll. This summer was a deflated pool float on the side of the road. It was early-morning Zoom interviews and old, shirtless men waiting for the bus, their skin thick and pink beneath the great sweep of sunlight. It was iced coffee runs and used furniture and cheap orange hair dye and dog toys and nicotine withdrawals and meandering around Six Flags like a local. It was cold sweat and security footage and sobs into the showerhead and black headlines and honey-infused lip balm and bundles of sour candy. From my bedroom window, I watched my little brothers, among all of the starved mosquitoes and crooked trees, aim pistol-shaped firecrackers at each other out in the backyard. I buzzed and thought vividly about cowboys, those janky rock stars with tobacco-stained jowls. Ideas went nowhere. Neurons bloomed into stirring, invisible explosions. I saw fire where there was only morning. I walked out into a thunderstorm at night, lightning declaring itself in white slings a few feet away. I wrote about murders. I put my hair up. I will do this for the rest of the year. I will do this for the rest of my life.
Jasmine Ledesma lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared or is set to appear in places like Borderlands, Vice, Rattle and [PANK] among others. Her work was also nominated for both Best of The Net and the Pushcart Prize in 2020. She was recently awarded a fellowship with Brooklyn Poets.
