Overripe Summer
August folded over me like sandpaper,
smoothed out my edges.
It dulled the blades in my shoulders;
I am softer, a bowl of unstitched silk.
It is only by mid-September that I breathe out August,
when I’ve lost its remnants in the changing leaves
and the pavement no longer melts in the heat,
or maybe I never truly had it in the first place.
It is only then, when the weight returns to my body,
that I realize how bright I was when sunscreen pooled in my collarbones,
and that the light no longer dances across from my mirror.
It is now climbing up the wall and out of reach.
I carve the long days into my window pane and run
my fingers over the grooves and think of summer.
I think maybe I don’t miss summer itself, but maybe
everything else that it brings. Maybe, I think.
I am not sure if it is the New that rouses me
mid-September, or if it is the absence,
but I am fragile, tender, just born. My elbows
tucked between my knees as I wait for my body to adjust.
Vines wrap around my ankles,
flowers grow in the too-ripe spots of my skull
and my body fills with fruit flies;
treat me gently at the end of the summer.
Muted
A mother and a daughter behind
a sliding glass door,
words muted, eyes bright
and lovely and sad under the red umbrella.
Their faces contort,
emotion threads through their hand gestures
and smile lines.
Heads nodding, shaking, bowing.
What would it have been like for her
to have known her mother
as a person and not a parent?
Would so much have gone unsaid?
Cruelty in the love they share
sinks deep in their coffee mugs.
They are warm and cold
and mother and daughter.
I could decipher the words
muffled by the sliding glass.
But instead I focus on the laughs, the cries,
the strained shouts and sighs--
voices I’ve heard my whole life,
behind slammed doors
and in intimate moments
at the bottom of the stairs.
They speak their own way of being,
as something shifts between them.
Caitlin Striff-Cave lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. Her poetry is forthcoming in Loud Coffee Press and Moot Point Magazine. She loves every month but March, has a bright orange water bottle with her at all times and will race you to finish the New York Times Mini Crossword. She hosts a storytelling podcast called “The Staircase: One Story at a Time.”