No Official Song This Summer
Not one crowd-pleasing hit blares
from car windows. No chorus of
cool breezes serenades beachcombers.
No anthem hot enough to climb
to the top of Billboard’s chart.
Gayle sings “misty taste of moonshine,
teardrop in my eye,” an old tune
we once hummed at the park, pumping
our legs toward the sky on a rickety
swing. The lyrics are so catchy,
I can smell the Blue Ridge Mountain air
and hear the rushing Shenandoah roll by.
For a moment, I consider moving to
West Virginia. My playlist is a fusion
of every high school heartbreak—
bitter, broken, stuck on replay, caught
between the advent of AI and the patience
it once took to send snail mail, to wait
in line for concert tickets my parents swore
would ruin my hearing. Remember tossing
pennies into mall fountains, or feeding
tokens at toll booths—the plunking swish,
cha-ching! when loose change landed.
Music isn’t dead, I tell Gayle’s girls,
but the oldest—who laughed at us for
fixing a cassette tape with a pencil—
slips in her earbuds when I compare
algorithms to streaming tides. Don’t mix
music with politics and ditch the expired
sunscreen, Gayle reminds me.
Hawaiian Tropic is too expensive now.
She sprays her three kids with the
CVS brand, because inflation means more
than just blowing up floats and hoping
they’ll last the whole season.
*
Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work, shaped by professional and lived experience in mental health, has appeared in Grand Little Things, Merion West, The New Verse News, and Eunoia Review.
