Off the Coast

Heat Wave

I am sitting with the weight of summer
on my chest, listening to the
AC vents drip the clearest
water on earth and I’m
thinking about how in the earnest
labor of machines you can hear the whir
of gratitude, the please and thank you of
gears in lockstep, a progeny that can recite
our origin story of technicolor details,
dark matter, bosons and other whiz
bits that exist or don’t but stubborn
white men in sterilized suits will
be certain after a few trillion more
atomic lovers are whipped into
intimate moments not unlike
a boy and girl shoved at each
other by scheming friends at
a middle school dance blooming with
red faces and quivering mouths
in search for words to name the
moisture of foreign hands that fuse into
the soup of an infant universe as
swelling bodies bust the seams of
hand-me-downs, the first signs
of complex life emerging