THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER
Photo by Gabrielle Johnson (ChasingHorizons)
A Poem by Aberdeen Livingstone
The Brooklyn street sounds waft in distant
through our ground-level window on spring’s
cool breeze. The table bursts with rainbow
bouquets and baskets of fruit and that one
heart-shaped candle. My liked songs shuffle
and spin around the empty apartment which
is like an ocean shell, washed in salt water
and waiting for its next inhabitant. Everything
is clean and lovely and familiar and mine.
The room is haunted by the ghosts of laughter
of my curly-haired roommate coming home soon
and I am writing stories of hope for my full-time
job and poems pile up in this document like
stones in an altar and he says he loves me and
I am reading Scripture at church on Sunday
and there is ice cream in the freezer and it is all
so good it frightens me. He was good in the years
of darkness and mute despair but this goodness
is a wild wave shot through with sunlight and I don’t
understand it and I am letting the wave take me.
Aberdeen Livingstone works for a nonprofit in New York City. Her poetry has been published in Ekstasis, Calla Press, and Solum Literary Press, and she has written essays for Koinesúnē Magazine and Reactor. She writes regularly for her substack, Awaken Oh Sleeper (aberdeenlivingstone.substack.com).
