Summer Rain After The Longest Damn Day by Gareth Spark

Smoke harnessing sky, old June
sits well on your shoulder-
dead tree spikes against
your thunder-full cloud;
and I do not move, still dressed
for sun bath and want
the rain to come, want to feel
beneath an action of the world,
to know,
water on shoulders,
that I am not a thing apart,
not memories, not dreams
but animal hair, and gut and bone.
Come rain and show me
the precious primacy.

I’ll sit here in the clogged heat
and wait.

Gareth Spark is from Whitby, Yorkshire. His short fiction and poetry has appeared in Shotgun Honey, Line Zero, Out of the Gutter, NAP, Poetry Bus and Deepwater Literary Review, among others. He reviews poetry online for Fjords Review, among others.