The paperback cover of the book I’ve been reading lifts and curls back, as if unable to endure contact in this sticky heat — especially with anything as dense and woolly as poetry. It’s the season of light beer and light reading. We close up the houses in the morning and the cooler night air persists through much of the afternoon, but we can’t do anything about the humidity. I make salads for supper — rice salads, bulghur salads, pasta salads, bean salads — cooking in the morning so they have the rest of the day to marinate and chill. When I need to make bread, as I did this morning, I bake it down here so as not to heat up the kitchen at my parents’ house. If there’s a breeze at suppertime, we sit outside and try to convince ourselves it feels refreshing.
The heat seems global. Facebook friends all around the northern hemisphere have been complaining, from the Pacific Northwest to Western Europe and even Japan. I’m a bit surprised: I thought that unpronounceable Icelandic volcano’s emissions last winter were going to give us a little short-term global cooling, but apparently not.
I’ve been happily occupied in designing a website for this year’s winner of qarrtsiluni’s chapbook contest, but that won’t be unveiled for another month. If you start noticing Via Negativa undergoing major changes, you’ll know that the heat-induced blog ennui has reached a critical stage.