Moving Home

Old men sing themselves
to sunstroke in idling

vans, their grown children
inside buying out

of season vegetables. We treat
our youth like succulents

on blistered windowsills,
the memory of sustenance 

enough for us. We keep
flattening the dust, the way

a highway grinds the shade
to pulp, a longitude line

on a dry-erase globe.
Insects dither the coughing

of our sleep, our parched
throats spasming in heat.

At night, rapt in apnea,
we repel the dreams

where we steep in a neighbor’s
tub water, retrace the peach

grey ring of a strange body’s dross
so longingly with our toes.