Rain on hot pavement

These posts stay free because I don’t believe good writing should live behind a velvet rope. But I also don’t believe writers should work for exposure. If you like my work, subscribe, pay what you can, share it, or drop a tip. Every bit of it keeps this going.

---

first drop
second drop

you were like that
arriving in the heat of something
out of nowhere.
You came down hard
on everything I’d been keeping
        dry.

this is how you know a surface
has been loved:
it smokes.

I put my hand out
to see what’s coming
over us.

Steam lifts like a vow,
a soul leaving the body

t h e
e a r t h
c o n f e s s i n g,

half-spoken, half-forgotten.

the grey mouth of the city
reaches for the sky
and the street remembers
every soul that ever walked away.

Grey-furred, stone-tongued,
the hiss of it, the sibilant mercy
rain soldering little stitches in the dirt,
a weird wound opening in the clouds,
bleeding like a season
turning in its sleep.

Shhhh.
Hssssss.
Ahhh.

I used to wear white dresses to the end of the road,
stand there like a question
the heat had already answered.

Now you arrive—
petrichor rising from the stone,
the tears of gods
who never had to choose
between getting soaked and becoming steam.

The pavement still holds my shape,
my heel sunk in the hot tar.

The elm knows.
The sparrow knows.
The cracked lip of the gutter knows
what a summer is
when the sky comes
  down low
      for you to drink.

Everything hard-edged
and loud
softens now
into the cooling
of a wet blessing.

Come, you say,
come back,
come down,
come open me.

The summer holds still
for one long breath
then releases all her cries
in a deluge.

the pavement
cools
slowly
as I do
near you.

---

---

Thank you for reading my work!

Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself!

I am a full time writer at the moment - I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and essays or dystopias when I’m really digging into possibilities.

If you’d like to support my writing, please consider subscribing, sharing, or becoming a paid subscriber.

Choose a Pay-What-You-Can Subscription:

1$ 2$ 3$ 4$ 5$

And if a subscription isn’t for you, you can always use my Buy Me a Coffee link.

I am a published writer. Curriculum of Feelings is a haunting, six-part journey that spans centuries and species, a visceral exploration of the “Problem of Evil.”
Through a collection of short stories, you follow five distinct vessels: a poetess silenced by her world, a slave who finds freedom in language, a tree that witnesses history’s worst acts, a whale carrying a dying song, and a boy tracking a collapsing future. Each life is a lesson in humility, humanity, and pain.