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Summer Afternoon

Judy Johnson

Dec 01 2013

1 mins

Till eleven o’clock you are perfumed

in the sweat you were born with.

 

At five, you stink of the sweat

you deserve.

 

No relief from the heat.

 

Just the melting

of external barriers.

 

A slow leak has the sun’s

white hot salinity

 

spilling into the horizon’s water table.

 

Coloured dusts of landscape

scatter

under the wind’s rug-beater.

 

Sounds seem

a sepia enactment

of summer’s past

 

the slow bark of an axe

 

the crackly dial tone

of a chainsaw

a suburb away.

 

A blowfly in the kitchen

stops and starts

too punch drunk to remember

the rhythm

of its drone.

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