Praise
Grab a glass of wine, curl up in your favorite reading spot, and then prepare to be swept away. Dave Malone's sexy, wistful Summer in Love will not disappoint.
—Susan Solomon, editor of Sleet Magazine
Summer in Love
Dave Malone
Smashwords Edition
First Edition
ISBN (EPUB): 978-0-9667744-9-8
Published by Trask Road Press
Copyright © 2011 by Dave Malone
Cover design by Jenni Wichern
Summer in Love is the second ebook in the Seasons in Love series.
Discover other titles by Dave Malone at Smashwords.com:
Spring in Love (first ebook in Seasons in Love series)
Under the Sycamore
Poems to Love and the Body
23 Sonnets
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors of the following print and online journals for first publishing my work:
Cave Region Review: “The Summer I Spent in White T-Shirts”
decomP: “today”
Forge: “Frappuccino Love!”
Gold Dust: “Found”
Hobble Creek Review: “Only Stars”
Sleet: “Editor Disappears from Upstate Farmhouse”
Snow Monkey: “Softer”
Spoken War: “Your Boob Job”
Tattoo Highway: Twig and Leaf Diner
Turbulence: “Summer Relic”
“Shape of My Days” and “Summer Relic” will also be featured in Sleet Magazine’s summer supplement 2011.
As well, I’d like to thank Darrelyn Saloom, with whom I share a special writing journey, for making excellent suggestions regarding the manuscript. And I’d like to express a very heart-felt thank you to Jenni Wichern for tracking down the perfect honeysuckle bloom and the subsequent gorgeous cover.
CONTENTS
The Summer I Spent in White T-Shirts
Editor Disappears from Upstate Farmhouse
You stood in the Ozark heat
where black snakes as big as thighs
slithered into knee-high fescue,
fireflies formed your fingertips into light,
and I fell in love with
you under constellations
we named after local landmarks.
I loved you too hard and too fast
as if we Harley’d ourselves home to a hearth
where I split wood for
weeks and you
rubbed the bare bones of my longing.
We made plaid shirts
our nightwear,
daywear, nightwear. And I loved you
through
your period and back again.
The evening sun peeled
the horizon like a potato
and left layers in its wake.
You kissed my freckled back
in dusty fog until you laid me
in grass as lush as fairways.
After years of loving,
I buried you then that night
as lovers are apt to do. No preacher
eulogized you. But you knew
none dared leave the Baptist pulpit
in July, the best month for prayin’
and revivin’ and blackberries comin’ on.
The Summer I Spent in White T-Shirts
the bourbon flowed
into Wild Turkey fifths.
I gripped fistfuls
at Ozark garden parties
where girls swooned
against oak barrels
lips full of moonshine and talk
that I wouldn’t stay long
standing up or shacked up
at the shotgun motel
down on Third and Main
in a town sleepier
than the drop-dead drunk
I was destined to become.
But you sank your teeth into me
beside the red motorcycle
all glazed with midnight dew,
and the moon like a tom cat
stretched out fierce
while you kissed me so hard
I fell to the earth,
my mouth full of crimson
Missourah dirt and blood
until you gathered me up
like a bucket of blackberries
and put your singin’
Baptist voice in my ear,
the chords of hill music
fiddle-flung and nearly
promising salvation.
Above the bee lady’s farm
the day can't decide
between gunmetal or blue.
You’ve left honeybee and peach tree
to roam the California coast
to paint landscapes and
hug your family into humor
casting their black eyes
into lighthouses of hope.
My naked toes split green grass
making it weep as lopsided
as Irish Joe’s post-oak fence
while you barefoot beach
at tree-lonely Silver Strand,
moments away from simmering
your famous calabacitas
for busty aunts and low-riding cousins,
scenes from wrinkled Polaroids
packed up in that dead leather trunk.
I reach the fruit tree grove
leaning on Bee Lady Hill
where desire stings
under the canopy of
boughs
like a scene from an old
black-and-white romance.
Two lovers tongue peaches and plums
while the man drowns in her charcoal hair.
The couple fades into armfuls of frames
thin as three fingers—
35mm strips in a dark room
where her sweet-corn syllables
prove silent as the fledgling
movies that preceded theirs,
her Spanish lost in his ear.
Te amo, te amo, si.
Mi amor, te deseo corazon mio.