For Summer - V. Rendina

My love sits between both Spring and Autumn fitting that it follows Fall.

I fell for you beyond consent, my heavy heart sunk weak in my knees begging please please please

don’t let this happen anymore.

But seeds began to grow.

My love for you was summer’s heat where sun burnt skin that blistered raw and red and ready to burst open at the seams.

I came undone inside your arms, under the first Blue Moon we’ve had all month, her sweltered glow cascading sheets on sutured skin, sticky sweet

from years of sweat.

And every whispered

“I Love You”

hung hazy in our humid air and slowly sunk into the soil planted firm beneath my knees now rooted to the floor.

Oh, Persephone would be proud for summer’s perspiration of prose and poetry pulsating through my stupid heart.

(You were my muse that bloomed the buds that gave me life)

My love blossomed pomegranate trees from those stupid weak knees locked forever in the ground, its fruit ripe with seeds so sweet and full you couldn’t wait to savor something new.

Famished with greed, you devoured my own blessings shared on your behalf and carved your name on the tree trunk skirting along my thighs

so I knew where to find you when you were ready.

And I know I shouldn’t call it love, but still I waited, while you smothered us both in the heat of my summer.

So maybe I was cruel like Hades, but I longed to see those seeds root something more inside your chest,

(you were so eager to lap up my sweet juices)

I wanted you to come for me in Autumn’s final dying breath.

but your love for me was Winter’s chill, no thoughts of Summer could thaw the ice lodged in your heart. You only think of sour seeds and blame me for the rotten fruit. Your frost bit hard into my fruit, and still I fell in hopes of Fall.

but here I know, in hopes of Spring,

I fell for you with Summer’s scorn still scarred across my chest my knees still stuck in soiled ground starving, searching, silent as I wait.

I wish I stole your pocketknife and cut my roots before you carved out my heart and called it “love”.

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V. Rendina is a poet and writer from Northeastern Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in Wilkes University’s literary magazine, The Manuscript, and has circulated among 38 buses in her home county as part of the Poetry in Transit program in 2016. She collects old editions of her favorite books and reads Neil Gaiman in her spare time. She has a debut collection of poems titled Shadow Truths releasing in November of this year.