smoke from a thousand miles away swallowed the june sky
and turned it brown as the river by Goose Island.
please wear a mask so it doesn’t get in your lungs
and she did —–we flew in together through the smoke
then i lost her twenty feet past my window.
the city was upside down and i got dizzy watching
skyscrapers plunge into the tumbling pit below.
thankfully i’d learned the patterns of CTA busses—
they’re creatures with their own agendas.
the people on the bus looked slow and parched
the buildings were parched too, and wilted to a
late-summer dandelion brown———–my life was skeletal
like puppet limbs on filament strings, lace spilling
from open mouths, or coyote laughter.
one day the sky opened up and i watched planes lost
in the clouds like flying whales————— eons away
the Loop towered into forbidden mountain shapes.
my head rang with june four years ago
when i was stupid and wide-eyed and grinning out
from forty-two floors up, cooled by summer rain.
it’s august and the sky is clear now. i live with my brother
between apartments. the city feels far away—i feel far away,
yet i sense something familiar despite
the fathoms between me and the moment:
every year at this time the sky spills toward the horizon
in atavistic urgency to melt and become the ocean again.
i can smell the sea just past these steel towers, can feel
sparks of salt burst between my teeth, at my heels.
i’m from the ocean and i haven’t seen it in a long time
but i like to imagine the summer’s final breeze will whisper
atoms away from my skin and to those distant waters.
Brian Clancy is a grad student at DePaul University in the Creative Writing and Publishing program. He primarily writes short horror fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in previous issues of The Orange Couch. He also likes movies and playing his guitar.