Jihad

September 12, and I can still feel the heat from yesterday cascading
like fireballs and falling airplanes through my double-paned windows,
where air stands stagnant like I held my breath to watch the sun rise this
morning, but in my room the air is cool and cheap and artificial and I
imagine a passing season of melting crayons and soured, clammy armpits
and welcome the first wave of freed, furled leaves as I pick one up and
taste it—but I only imagine—as I look across the room at my closet of
sweaters and wonder which one I'll wear today, wishing that outside
my windows the light is crisp upon the parking lot and the air is calm and
the heat has flocked south with the waterfowl and fall has broken with
browning leaves—but the trees are full and thick—and, stepping outside
onto the landing of the black-patched steel staircase and into the furious
flame of summer, I realize, thrashing blindly like a mole back into the
blackness behind me, wandering, groping through a splotched hallway to
my room to jamb my pinky toe on an unmovable object; the heat is still
here, hovering on radio waves of stigmata or in the air like a dust cloud,
like Steinbeck, unsettling and sobering and yelling its unrest, the day after.