Meditations in the Hottest Summer on Record

​Let’s go for a swim, I say, desperately
in love with you. A Wyoming sky
unfurls to an unseen point
beyond where light can touch. Before us,
a river dropped like a line of sapphires
into a cradle of peachleaf willows,
and my want, like a sister,
always a breath ahead.
You, undressed, the morning
light finding refuge in the down on your skin,
a golden shroud swallowed by the lip
of the river. You are half gone
to the water before I follow.
It is unseasonably warm. No shiver,
no bone-ache—the natural deterrents
erected by the world to make us think
twice about hasty love. A skin of silk
pulls up over the sensitive ankle,
the choral swell of the calf, into the eddy
behind the knee. What has already touched you
now touches me. And the heat
almost artificial, the result of years of longing
for comfort, a human sort of longing,
no respect for boundaries.
The salmon cannot abide this kind of heat.
They no longer disturb the river
with their chandeliers of light, their seeking,
their slender pumping muscles
shivering the world awake.
Their white, cooked bodies leave the low water.
Through the flute of love’s vision they are
a hundred surfacing angels, a harbinger
of some distant dread, a haunt.
Who will witness us at the end, when we have wasted
the world to the fever of our want?

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Divyasri Krishnan studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work appears in DIAGRAM, Muzzle Magazine, Annulet, Dunes Review, and elsewhere. She has further been recognized by the Best of the Net, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, Periplus Collective, Pittsburgh Humanities Festival, and Palette Poetry.