"Humidity" by Kate Northrop

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            Humidity

 

 

 

I was still a girl.  At dusk, I saw the rows of pear trees, trunks brushed halfway up in lime, running back over the hillside.  In the end

 

 

.  I turned myself into a headlight.  C’mon out, you janky misty Motherfuckers—

 

.  Drawn to change landing in a dish of change (paper clips, safety pins), I am like my mother, oh very like

 

.  Dropping, at night, toward a runway’s landing lights? Voices in the ribs of a shipwreck

 

. Amy Lord’s older brothers, I remember, jumped down, one with a boom box.  Little Feat, or some shit, carried on through the pines

 

.  (Earlier they’d been on top of the gates, getting high)

 

.  A driver lays on the horn.  The crows, gathered around adead crow on Sheridan, scatter overhead.  They keep returning then breaking up, returning and breaking up

.  The orchard, of course, was an order

 

.  Now we live in Laramie, off I-80, the acceleration of semis, leveling out after the descent, a constant, throaty presence

 

.  The bigger girls kept walking up the trail, then they turned, they walked back through us

-Kate Northrop

(Humidity  first appeared in Sugar House, vol. 22)