Summer Looks Good on You Vanessa Kisuule

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol.
Hours billow like fresh sheets,
shimmering open and shut with
the moth wings winking at dusk.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
Each season is endless until it ends.
May we never learn this lesson,
but float on, oblivious as bubbles.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
The sky begs to be stroked,
balloons scattered in its folds.
Puffed jewels airborne and brazen
As childhood dreams left to the
whims of wind.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
On your summits we often sit,
take in the Tetris sandwich of roofs.
Sometimes, the stories squatting below
peek out from the windows and wave.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
We’re forced wear our shoulders lower,
worship the inelegance of sweat.
Slick skin bare as birth
and just as precious.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
Evenings do not land like guillotines,
instead light bumps into dark
like a favoured old friend.
They linger a while,
in aimless twilight embrace.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
We worship the sun’s slow magma,
Sometimes forgetting ourselves,
navels and bald heads exposed,
slow roasting in simmering fields.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
The Harbourside clinks with padlocks
etched with wind worn promises
We dance in the warm breeze.
feet dangling over water like
an empty threat, a misremembered
lyric on the tongue.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
Sugar hangover. Sticky pint glass.
Wasps dancing needless ellipsis.
Drunk butterflies swim through
the sorbet in our stomachs.

Summer looks so good on you, Bristol
I stride purposefully up Park Street,
building strength in my hill-shy thighs
All I want is to watch kid’s bellies
gurgle with laughter and sing myself
ageless. A seagull steals
my tuna sandwich, a busker borrows
my time. I do not mind. Under a
watchful sun, it is easy to be kind.

Header photo: Vanessa Kisuule (Jon Craig).