MID

Work connects to aging and youth to play
Or does it, what is summer, age happens
If I will or no, no work required. My cells
ease into age, soft as this breeze from the garage door
Summer is music, surely, if
It’s anything, but not this music –
The coffee shop’s fucking with me, I text
You, playing Incubus. Abandon
ship! you say. Conversation is an art
Of age; it comes with age: telepathy
That makes each sentence a compendium
And makes fucking an art of age, also.
Art takes up what life has censored: unwritten
Middle-aged pleasures; summer melancholy.

I’m still me. Work is still play, saying
“I a-door you” to Ramona slouching
By the door. She put her soft jowls on
my cold foot this morning. In the evening,
she put her asshole on my big toe.
June gloom: in the Bay, music’s
More summer than summer.
Rattle of drums pushes the night forward.
People ask to touch my coat, wisps of wool
off it like smoke. All day I longed for happiness
I could describe, and mostly to describe it.
Fat squirrels run along the fence with my apricots,
half-ripe. You said the bower vine bloomed
this year already. It didn’t. It bloomed

Last summer, suddenly, after I thought
it wouldn’t. You shrug, time flies
Like the radio, like the summer flies
Their drowsy infuriating wings. Ramona
cowers under the desk. She liketh not
the flies and not the fly swatter. Music
is what you don’t have to remember
It’s there again and again. There’s whole
categories now I can’t remember.
Names of new songs and artists,
new people’s names, except when they belong
to dogs. I want to say ... Joshua? No, Lucas.
Oh, Lucas! Nice to see you, Lucas.
Goodbye, Joshua.

Honestly, summer’s work sometimes.
Time stretches like medicine. I capture
the orange seeds with my tongue, push them
to my inner cheek. How does one eat the rich?
Cheese bread, 15 seconds in the microwave
Hot, a little spongy, bitter, bright
You tenderly draw my finger in and
Give it the idea of a bite
Each summer weighs more, I want to say, but
More of what? I know as long as you don’t
ask me. You say, let’s play this reindeer game.
I don’t believe in summer but I do
Believe the idea of summer
Produces summers. A year is life and

The house it lives inside of. Pollen falling
Out of my hair all day. Ale said writing
a paragraph for class was more boring
Than watching a dust mote float softly
to a surface devoid of interest
And sit there until the end of time.
Time is a music, swift, quiet, on which
I’m swimming. Crashing waves tumble regardlessly
Work is the art of knowing how little is possible
Really anything can be work and that’s what’s hard
A little fearful like an organ score
Try to put myself somewhere: at a party
in a movie in a song. I can’t find
a place for my coat at this party.

I asked Pauline for an assignment and
She said “ekphrastic poem about queer music”
But that became what’s ekphrastic, what
Is music, what is queer, and why am I
this person? And that became this. We have to
moisten the snail every half-hour, says Ale.
So how long do snails live? 45 minutes?
Is aging like, as Keats did, coating your tongue
and throat with cayenne pepper to better
appreciate chilled wine? How is it that
music floats, supported by nothing, that
Summer encodes in one’s natal clime?
Caked sand trailing up my legs, fire ants, wreaths
Of stinging caterpillars in the trees.

My mom texted “Having California day
In New Orleans today!” That couldn’t have
Been summer, possibly late spring. New Orleans,
You’ve fallen through the bottom of heat
Already, that hasn’t changed. Well, even
Heat is changed by getting hotter. Keats was
The Cronenberg of his day. I stand
Beside you, ask for whatever. You hand
It to me, our fingertips touch.
In summer, night is still day, age is still youth –
Our scene within the scene
Maybe my dreams have become more modest
We played “fuck, marry, kill”;
Alejandra plays “gas, trash, or mid”.

Get the tweezers I need a splinter
Extracted get the flashlight all my troubles
Sinking and swimming. You keep calling
The vine ‘ivy’, which it isn’t, as though
I would plant ivy, worse than
A mouth full of blood. It’s bower vine,
A pink and filtered room. Killers refuse
To disappear despite my theory
Of them, but I got the jar lid open.
And if I was going up and now I’m
Going down, fucking is anti-gravity
Like first watching 2001 at age
Forty-seven, in 2024,
Its balletic spaceships light as ever.

Life is music for some of us who’ve been
Waiting the whole conversation to say
“Pride and prejudice, ass and assonance.”
In the corner, the watermelon hisses
Softly, fermenting from inside out.
Maybe summer is always the middle
Of one’s life. We return to a center:
That’s the present tense. As if Dante’s woods
Were a choiceless circle, that led to no
Purgatory, no Hell, no Paradise.
I thought I’d write this to convince Pauline
Not to worry about aging, because
If fucking you is this fantastic, how
Could age exist (Hi, Pauline! Stop making

Me feel old.) But, truly, I’ve been sad. Aging,
Sure, but ‘gestures at world’ – all this. War, strife
Propaganda, hunger, lies, the poet-world
I knew and myself reflected In it
Breaking up and floating off, like icebergs.
What if life, at its best, is struggle
In seasonal returns? Gains that are losses
Also; and me, trying to rescue myself,
Who is ungrateful. Ramona’s so sad
When you leave, she tucks her ears back. “You can’t
Have ears,” I tease, “Ears are for being
Happy.” She sleeps for twenty hours a day.
I believe in solidarity
Forged out of strife. Otherwise, I feel

A little iffy. Say more, say less, get
younger, get older. Love is how time
Accumulates into sex.
Step into the corona, extent of
your arms to kiss against your neck. You tilt
Your head to press your lips to my neck too
I love that; I do rather like that you know
My love for going off the rails. Ramona
Plunges into raspberry canes, emerges
In triumph, blood streaming from her mouth, with
her orange ball, so proud to bear the sun.
What is my due or anyone’s? You owe
Me a flock of migrating geese
I owe you some spores. I say “Hal, I wouldn’t

do that if I were you” in my best robot voice.
You stare blankly. Oh shit, I got it wrong.
Dave’s the astronaut, Hal’s the computer
his negative flesh carved out of void. I’m
Afraid of the dark times, and summer is
A watchtower, height of the year, from which
To scan for dark times. A gloomy wood,
a dusky wood, a dark wood. What then would
a queer heart look like –
What in this season or this churning would
be felt in the deep heart’s core versus heart's
periphery? And where’s the writing to
hold summer at arm’s length, hot weight
Of obligation to enjoy? Hello,

Mid; goodbye. I can’t keep all the languages
but I’ve walked through them, black fig and mud smashed
On my sole. Marmoleum sounds like
Death, but it’s just flooring. Where did Keats get
his cayenne? Remember, in Hell, the demon
farting like a brass band? Ed elli
Avea del cul fatto trombetta. If you’re
not tortured there, but toured, like Dante, Hell
Is just another place to be, to
Report back from. Hot summer walks, sky
enamel-blue.Ramona’s wedge head panting
Like a furnace; Paul says his 3 principles
are impermanence, simultaneity, and –
crap, what was the third one? One of my jokes

About forgetting and mistaking names
Is that everyone looks like someone else
When you’ve wandered long as I upon
These lands. What if I were a demi-urge?
I guess I’d just keep yelling. I don’t know
What to make of life, except for this. Let’s
Say that if summer is how quick time passes,
Music Is how little that matters, just for
Right now. I put off sleep to stroke along
Your side, your skin softer than sleep, silky
And calm. Enough of the lessons, just sit
Down, sit the fuck there. The summer should be
Back any minute now. I’ll sleep when I’m dead,
I’ll sleep in wintertime, I’ll sleep when I’m young...

Lauren Levin is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of Nightwork (Golias Books, 2021), Justice Piece // Transmission (Nightboat Books/Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018), and The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016), which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award. With Eric Sneathen, they edited Honey Mine by Camille Roy (Nightboat Books, 2021). Recent work appears in the chapbook Dear Em from eyelet press and the forthcoming chapbook A Little Chat with the Sun from Clones Go Home. Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O'Hara. From New Orleans, LA, they live and work in Richmond, CA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, parenting, and anxiety.