It’s never summer here Dear Love Walter in a linen suit chin held high There is a Burning Bush in the front yard Love When I think about women I’d have a Guinness if I had a Guinness If we, as we are Then we will Dear Love Always the idea of the commune in the Ozarks Dear Love You climbed the pyramids of Chichen-Itza A bunch of Americans wishing they were Li Po and Basho Dear Love You let the defacer live in your apartment Saw one in the shower and tried to see another Into the dark of the show shines a door It is summer here and flowering Last night rain all night I’d like to learn Helter Skelter The garage apartment with an open door Where else can you go Saw him try Dear Love in the mosh pit Count the faces and the ways Dear Love You may laugh when you hear the news This blue and gray day is about to fall asleep Tell me Love again who you are leaving How do I look It’s finally summer and it never will be summer Those were the best fucking peaches in the universe I try not to smoke I’m not in love with smoking My belly is rounder now than ever before There is no summer more hysterical You felt so badly when we made such noise Now I’m getting a If guitar playing was so damned easy What if we were in Austin I never beat anyone up but some kids If this is summer then I’m having none of it
Brian Clements is the author of Uses Cases (Mudlark No. 28) and half a dozen other collections, including most recently a chapbook, In Review, from Red Glass Books. He is the founding editor of the small press Firewheel Editions and its Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and he coordinates the MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.
Author’s Note: “Apologies to William Carlos Williams, Ryan Adams, Charles Wright, Paul Celan, and Jim Scrimgeour for my appropriation of their lines or phrases.” BC
Acknowledgments: Several of the poems, collected here for the first time, originally appeared in New American Writing, Otoliths, and Faultline. The cover image of not meant for you Dear Love is a photo collage made by Brian Clements.