Ninety and Ninety

By R. S. Carlson

Another night we do not
open the windows
to ninety and ninety.

The early newscasts called for
major appliance usage
delayed till eight

or later lest the power
grid serve up blackout
for supper. We cool our

house below the temp prescribed,
still sweating unless
staring down vent or fan.

This should not be here.
Bangkok lives this way, Guangdong,
rice paddies flirting with

urban sprawl of Ho Chi Minh,
Phnom Penh and Taipei—
there one expects to wake

in sweat from recycled dreams
of half-soak, half-sleep
on sheets never quite dry,

dreams sprouted in cooler soils
on cloud-shrouded peaks
during winter monsoons

(yet still wet, too wet to ease
comfort into sleep),
peaks named by altitudes

charted on foreigners’ maps
despite the local names
carried generation

after generation by
woodcutters, hunters
and farmers knit to their

terrain when mother buries
the afterbirth in
soil decades before it

opens the second time for
the adult flesh cast,
cooled at last, past this sweat.

This poem was originally published in Slake No. 4. To read all of the stories from that issue, purchase the issue or subscribe at shop.slake.la.