The season of killing heat is at the window
we uncover the cooler box salve its heart and joints
test the bleed line where it threads across the roof
drops over the edge to nourish the fat black lizard
haunting the sediment of leaves
valves are adjusted tiny tourniquets loosened
if I put my ear to the pulse of clear bubbles
bumbling toward the precipice I hear the hiss
of leaking years all the long hot days
we played Monopoly on cool concrete floors
built cardboard houses for our orphaned dolls
lulled by the dependable drone of the cooler box
waiting for dark sky and lightning over the canyon
great sighs in the trees the crack
of boulders borne by broken water
the rush of what will carry us.

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Charity Everitt is retired following a career in technical writing and engineering software design and development. She finds the linguistic precision required in her technical career to be eminently applicable to poetry, making tangible the process of dissolving boundaries between the actual and the sparks of the mysterious. Her poems have appeared in Lyrical Iowa, Comstock Review, Concho River Review, Her Words/Black Mountain Press, and River Heron Review, among others.

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