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| Photo credit: Phoenix Rescue Mission: “Last summer, record-breaking heat took the lives of 494 men and women in Arizona. As a community, we need to step up and reach out to those who may not know how deadly our summer can be.” |
Wake up; check for rain; the daily high’s
a body count and rubbing the eyes
won’t move the images away
of yesterday’s encampment
winding around two downtown blocks
in plain sight of the sky.
It’s so hot all
I can do is to pour
this bottle of water over
my legs, and then
another, and
then another. It isn’t even news today
with nine semi-automatic victims
in California and
a gunman’s high-capacity rage
recalled by his ex-wife:
I'm going to beat him up, I'm going
when they're mad. The bedding is makeshift
on Eleventh Avenue, the clothing
T-shirt bright,
and blankets soften
the pavement in varying shades
of poverty. Sometimes a face
floats out from among
the collage of nylon and humanity:
remember it. Remember just
this one on behalf of them all. Remember
the song: And there but for fortune,
may go you
or go I
David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. A new book, Unmapped Worlds, featuring older poems that had suffered neglect, is out from FutureCycle Press. He recently took up watercoloring again, after twenty dry years.
