A thunderstorm executes a citizen’s arrest on Heat, Humidity & Co –
that collective working to extended our lease on a brutal summer.

Cloud cover is a low ceiling strung with dark blue bulbs
like cutaneous cysts. You can smell hail before it falls – ozone

and the sky’s list of party tricks that lead to a spread of petrichor
delivered by invisible crop dusters. Our senses track storms

as atmospherics that wheel and revolve from headland to horizon.
Trees leave prints of themselves – self-dissolving stitches

on the retina. And like an old cargo plane bent out of shape
at the end of a runway and gleaming as it turns, the moon

appears then floats away. As static improves the silence between
songs on a record, so thunder lays down analogue versions

of itself, sound-checking a cold front from shiver to something
fast approaching shelter.