Joan Fleming
All-time record exceeded in historic heatwave
August in Madrid,
the days
slug along and fry.
I am impossible as
a good
right sea
– a corrugated shopfront
bolted
against thieves. The real sea
is hours away and gagging,
chemical
tang on the air as a fat hose blasts
our marks
from the sidewalk: spittle, dog mess, spilled
cerveza from where we took our joy
in the furnace. I walk the streets in squint. The dark sun
of a jamon swings in someone’s fist.
A man without a roof throws a watch at a rubbish bin and it bursts into
its pieces.
Drought summer
Songs about low rivers
are songs about girls who wanted
everything
I take my yearning down to the only
scrap of city that keeps its turtles
wild
A grid of twelve ceaseless fountains
salutes a current
in dwindle
Once my vision of my life encompassed
no body of water I could not
swim
Now, I forbid myself a furthering
Think of the horseman, says my love
I do
Yesterday, someone well-meaning
handed me a peach wrapped double
in plastic
The day is like an oven I’ve just opened
I cannot do little
enough
Joan Fleming reads “All-time record exceeded in historic heatwave”
Joan Fleming reads “Drought Summer”
Joan Fleming’s forthcoming third collection, Hot Perpetual Half-Light Winter, is a dystopian verse novel exploring ritual and the limits of language in the ruins of ecological collapse. Joan holds a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University, Melbourne, and is the New Zealand/Aotearoa Commissioning Editor for Cordite Poetry Review.