A record heat, outdone


I hoard hues—a monarch’s orange grace, an orchid’s
singing lavender, but it’s difficult
to sit with the dying, because you’re a nerve
peaking through skin, skimming time. Every
shade of the gorgeous earth sloshing inside
me awaits torrents of a bleach whose smell
laced this morning’s sweltering air.
 
Lately, literary journals request
hopeful takes on global warming’s
future. As if we could untangle those muddy knots
of rainbows affixed to the rabid drum fan
of last hurricane season. Torrents of rain
and colorful, sky-wide frowns evaporate
into a heavy humidity.  
 
Another colossus of a cruise ship docks
for tourists to disembark and dissolve
atop our rickety bar stools. Others wander
to the sanctuary where I volunteer
 
and as I’m feeding a scruffy, baby mockingbird
his breakfast of mealworms, a Midwestern woman’s
sweet, sunburnt face and the gentle tilt
of her endeared head condense this steam
into a cool dew, like the one that awakens
grass blades at dawn.



Acclimating in Key West 

Everyone says that our tightrope 
will soon slacken. The sky yellows 
into a nausea and the red-gold
of a hunch rises from the streets. Driving 
down Keys street, a morse-code of pot-holes 
and softening asphalt unwinds 
in the gut. Ever on the verge of a verge, 
we wobble atop ropes and wait
for the reckoning. 

There’s this pain of becoming
okay: With an ocean hot enough 
to rival bathtime or the ubiquity of breaking
weather headlines. The ache of developing
muscle memory as I leap over 
my neighbor’s scalding sidewalk. 

But what hurts the most? The clouds 
nuanced in dusk’s pastel chrome linger, still
gut-punch-me beautiful on this island infested 
with invasive species and mutating mosquitoes 
and payloaders overflowing with rotten algae. 

_______________________________________

Courtney Hitson teaches English at the College of the Florida Keys. She currently has work forthcoming in Potomac Review, Sky Island Journal, and Pinch. Outside of writing, she enjoys drawing, freestyle unicycling, and philosophy. Courtney and her husband, Tom (also a poet), reside in Key West, Florida with their two cats.