I'm said to leave summer romances behind me like ashes afloat,
fluttering in the hazy fog, dissipating with warm rainy drizzles on the asphalt
and the truth of it lies in the way lakewater curls my hair,
the way swaying reeds on the sunny boardwalk brush my toes
and turn my freckles into a cloudless Wisconsin sky.

Summer doesn’t come to you that way.
I see it in the way the cold carries ghosts of your breath to the heavens
and sends back its gifts to stick to your hair, your coat.
I should've known, when frost never bit your lips as it did mine,
that you were not something a pebbled beach sculpted from pink foam
to drop at my feet like a sun-warmed stone.