This morning, a cardinal
lands on my back fence,
opens its beak.
Nothing.

Even the birds
save their songs
for weather worth singing about.

The papi store thermometer
reads 105° at 9 AM.
Someone has drawn a floppy dick
in condensation on the glass.

A man sells bottles of water
from a styrofoam cooler near the highway.
His son collects the bills,
counts, loses track, starts over.

A mail carrier's uniform
hangs from a telephone wire
like a flag of surrender.
The route walks itself now.

The Schuylkill barely moves,
thick with what we've given it.
Three blocks over,
they're planning funerals
one after another.

My friend in Maine texts:
“Pretty nice up here”
I send him the obituaries.
He stops texting.

But Tony's daughter
turns five today.
He fills the kiddie pool
with the last of his ice.

She doesn't know
he can't afford his medicine.
She squeals.

The whole block hears it.
That sound we'd forgotten,
joy without calculation,
pure as water, brief as ice.

We lean from windows,
drawn to it like a memory
of rain, of breathing easy,
of when this city

was a place
that loved us back,
before we learned
the difference between

surviving
and living,
between the heat
that breaks

and the heat
that breaks
you.