Drought Dream
The dry heat spiderwebbing fault lines onto my knees, loosening the telephone wires that shadow the sidewalk. The concrete, blistered with dandelions, swelling like the creek in reverse: how the inky, emerald water receded by inches for weeks until one day there were deer grazing on shards of yellow grass. Through the window above the kitchen sink: three-leaf clovers & cracked terracotta, oranges plummeting from their sunburnt branches. Dirt stitched to the waxy rinds, all pulp & pith in my teeth, glazed in mud under the leaking faucet. How I just can’t put my finger on it, the thread between here & the drain. How the pale pink paint peels from the walls like flayed skin. The flies lick thimbles of salt from my palms & the door-handle dust plumes into mirage: everything I’ve ever wanted, how it was gone before I said goodbye.
Julie Wong is an undergraduate student at UCLA. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a poetry finalist in the Rising Voices Awards. Her work is published or forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, The Shore, Gone Lawn, Sierra Nevada Review, ellipsis…, and elsewhere.
