How Hot?
It’s so hot this hen won’t lay.
She’ll hold her eggs for a cooler day.
But when she lets them go at last
they’ll turn rotten very fast.
It’s so hot this dog won’t walk,
just a short one, then she’ll balk,
flop in cool grass in the shade,
while Mama longs for lemonade.
It’s sizzling hot all over town.
So hot the grass is blanching brown.
It stabs your butt, so you can’t sit.
Are we in drought? No doubt of it.
Katherine Edgren’s book The Grain Beneath the Gloss is available from Finishing Line Press. She also has two chapbooks: Long Division and Transports. Her poems have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Coe Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Peninsula Poets, and Barbaric Yawp, among others.