Kate Northrop, "Humidity"

                                              Winky Lewis ©2022

             

Humidity

 

 I was still a girl.  At dusk, I saw 

 the rows of pear trees, trunks 

 brushed halfway up in lime, 

 running back over the hillside. 

 In the end

 

 

 . I turned myself into a 

 headlight.  C’mon out, you janky

 misty Motherfuckers—

 

 . Drawn to change landing in 

  a dish of change (paper clips,

  safety pins), I am like my

  mother, oh very like

 

 . Dropping, at night, toward a 

 runway’s landing lights? 

 Voices in the ribs of a

 shipwreck

 

 . Amy Lord’s older brothers, I

  remember, jumped down, 

  one with a boom box. Little Feat,

  or some shit, carried on 

  through the pines

 

 . (Earlier they’d been on top 

of the gates, getting high)

 

 . A driver lays on the horn.  

 The crows, gathered around a

 dead crow on Sheridan, scatter

 overhead.  They keep 

 returning then breaking up, 

 returning and breaking up

 

 . The orchard, of course, was 

 an order

 . Now we live in Laramie, off 

 I-80, the acceleration of semis, 

 leveling out after the descent, a 

 constant, throaty presence

 

 . The bigger girls kept walking

  up the trail, then they turned,

  they walked back through us

                        -Kate Northrop

               "Humidity" first appeared in SugarHouse, vol. 22