Florescence
By Logan Lee
When the mango blossoms blushed into fruit, we knew
that we had reached the doldrums of summer. The sky
dragging its robin-egg-blue quilt over our tender flesh.
Days reduced to the sluggish march of the sun towards
the horizon. If we spoke, our words would pearl into honey
and trickle from candied lips—the sibilance of syllables
slipping into a saccharine syrup. Months drifted along
wind suffused with the perfume of alahe’e flowers.
Sugary breeze tonguing along our skin and seducing us
into placidity. By the time July crawled to its close,
our sun-drunk stupor had reached its zenith. Waves
of sweltering heat swelling to meet our torpid bodies
as we stumbled into an aubergine sedan. A muddled
chronology of Kamehameha Highway left leaking
between our heft fingertips: Waipi‘o’s crimson soil
blooming into bruises, Hale‘iwa’s sugarcane meadows
unfolding into the distant ocean, Mount Ka’ala’s summit
glittering through stratocumuli. When the air grew leaden
with perspiration, we retrieved bottles of chilled liliko‘i juice,
sweated through their sheer cloth wrappings, and pressed
them to each others’ brows. Merciful respite from summer’s
oppressive fever. Cloying kiss of sickly sweet nectar
holding our throats hostage. We envisioned the years to come
abandoned to a haze of daylight, ripened fruit, honeyed air
trailing sugary swirls across skin. Our amaranthine summer
never fading into the horizon.
Author Bio: Logan Lee is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet originally from Honolulu, Hawai’i, and now a student at Yale University. His poetry is published or forthcoming in The Orchards Poetry Journal and AC | DC Journal.