Slump by Emily Lake Hansen

Slump

In California they named misfortune,
blamed everything on the sweltering
Santa Ana, the off-year winds
that carried dry heat into October.
The year they were worst, I was 9
and I sat in the backyard for hours
fanning myself with schoolbooks.
Lizards scurried on the hot cement,
and I watched the dog chase them,
their tails lollipop sticks protruding
from his mouth. Here I’m at a loss
for what to call it: the record heat
that killed the clover, that browned
resilient moss. Our dog lays out
on what’s left of the grass. Is there
a name I can give this slumping?
Last night I fell to the floor
and couldn’t move. I touched
my face tenderly — nothing else
to do — pressed my hands like ice
to the hurting spaces of my body.

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Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled writer and the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, CALYX, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, So to Speak, SWWIM, and The South Carolina Review among others. Emily lives in Atlanta where she is Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech.