【Written by Gemma Feltovich】

My friend tells me,
God is not something you believe in,
it’s something you feel in flashes.
Like a thunderstorm. Like the sublime.

Or the taste of the air at the end of a long summer,
late and apologetic.
The kind that reaches into your turned-out pockets
and nudges your fingertips like a dog.

See, you do not believe in the wind, until it touches
your face, lifts the corners of your coat.

Or maybe, it’s like this— what else could the clouds do but rain?
We want to think
there are still patches of snow on the mountains in June, waiting
to trickle down. There are cool spots in the desert.

(They are shrinking… they are shrinking…)

But say the giants have been sleeping
and you cannot trap the wind.
Say the reservoirs are sinking.
Venice is drowning.

So it goes. Still,
they look straight at the thing and don’t see it.
Mhm, he says,
nodding his head like a flower. Mhm.

The heat comes on slow and it doesn’t stop.