by Rachel Linton
Dear August, you are
an undreamt thing, too living
to produce ghosts, too real
to lay a fertile soil for imagination.
We must live in you, not
on or around you; we must hear
the screech of cicada, feel
the drip of sweat down our neck.
Dear Memory, you dream
under the dust we call time,
waiting to be awakened.
The perennial bulb, hibernating
until the echo calls it back, across
decades—the scent of earth,
the chirp of crickets, the crack of bat
against ball—the leitmotif of life,
remember me, remember me? See,
here, sings memory. Here, this
August, twenty Augusts ago, you
have lived me before.
Rachel Linton is a playwright, poet, and law student at the University of Chicago. Her poems have previously appeared in Rollick Magazine, Cathedral Canyon Review, Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, and The Quarter(ly), and are forthcoming in The Sunlight Press.
Emerge Literary Journal 