Matea Šimić

One Hundred Years of Summer

summer made itself at home
and now refuses to leave

for all we shake it out of the window,
it keeps coming back daily, riding the dust
of blooming indifference

streets melt away under our feet. hungover,
we step on each other like ice cream dribbles
while Blue Skies smell like bubble gum

as we stretch rays of sunshine
and wind them around our index fingers,
right now, in this endless saccharine moment
made up of all the un-s and over-s and too-s,
wouldn’t you like to scream:

IT’S TOO MUCH,

but the heat is nauseatingly sweet
and our heads droop in dizzy spirals,
susceptible to salmonella
and burns from such a spiteful star

if I had one wish
I’d switch off the sun
so for a moment we could rest
our eyes from its ardent damnation

About the Author

Matea Šimić holds an MA in Comparative Literature and English Language and Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her poems and short stories have appeared in English and Croatian in journals such as EuropeNow, Astronaut, Strane, Arteist and Poezija, among others. In 2014, she founded NEMA, a bilingual journal for literature and arts. She lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.