Christmas in July

By J.D. Isip

The heat song came on a noonday,
“I’ll be home for Christmas” and the words
seemed like a misplaced memory
you find after it was needed—you can count
on a song out of time, a world out of place.

He was wandering, a planet out of orbit,
the faces around looked away. Please have
snow. Please have answers, rhyme, reason.
He kept wiping the sweat from his face,
I’m dreaming, he thought, of a place I…

An unrelenting sun, a whitewashed
boulevard—please have snow—voices, cars,
two hours watching the line flatten in a beep, beep
beee…home for Christmas. She went slowly.
It was the cadence of those beeps

That seemed to say and mistletoe, and presents,
drove him through the nurses’ station, past
the coughing emergency room, through glass
doors to a bright and burning summer
landscape barren and cold.