Summer Fling, by Sara Eddy

Photography by Dominique Thiebaut (USA/France) contemporary. Click image for artist site.

Summer Fling

Summer crashes in one day,
drunk as usual
full of crude jokes
and maudlin love poems,
and you can’t help yourself:
he’s a drug, he’s a bad boy
he serves a heady
cocktail of nights
at seventeen, driving alone
past fields of fireflies,
the constellations
that held your hand through
heartbreak, through
the creak and snap
of growing up. Summer 
keeps those stars
in his pocket, and brings
them out just as you tire
of humidity and air conditioning,
the too-obvious beauty
of peonies, zinnias, asters.
And you are seduced again,
your old body feels silvery
and touchable, and before long
you’re drinking wine
naked by the edge of a pond,
planning your next good life.

Sara Eddy

Sara Eddy: "​I am the assistant director of the writing centre at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Some of my poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Threepenny Review, the Baltimore Review, and Spank the Carp. My chapbook of poems about bees and beekeeping, Tell the Bees, was released in October of 2019 by A3 Press, and another chapbook of poems about food, Full Mouth, will come out from Finishing Line Press in October 2020. I live in Amherst, Massachusetts with a teenager, a black cat, a white dog, and three beehives."