It’s 8 PM when I step out
into the spring air
but still light enough
to see
The sky is cool
and tinged with that blurry pinkness
that is also a shade of blue
The breeze is the kind of breeze
that deserves the smooth, stretchy syllable
that is the word breeze
A wind that makes you long
to be dissolved into a flurry
of petals, and taken wherever it decides
to go
Even if it’s to the gas station
Earlier in the day, it was crispy-hot
as the paparazzi sun blared its camera flash
on the spring grass, and the people
foolish enough to walk under it
and burn
like me
and my mother-in-law
Everyone praises the sun
in this gray soaked land
for ten seconds, with one hand
over their eyes
and the other peeling
the second skin
of their sweat-plastered shirt
off their glistening chests
Then they hate it, and wish for the rain
But I know, right now
at 8 PM, as I walk through
the lilac-scented air
that the landscape needed to be pounded
by the meat-mallet sun
and tenderized
into the pink-blue faerieland
that is all around all around me
called twilight
