I looked at the evening sky
as one does

a festooned egg. Etched

clouds on blue darkness
cloudson(like blue on black).

Barbecues spread out beneath it
on the shoreline, steadily burning,
blinking when stoked.

I noticed
the fingers of my left hand

were muzzled in my right hand.
They felt too small,
or somehow far away,

cheap placeholders for real things—

or blurred versions of fingers,
numb, ponderous: spines with intention
lacking extremities.

People ran. They ran
together in the same direction

at different speeds.
The summer was ending.

The dark was still young—
it looked to us
to see what we thought of it.

—

Griffin Brown is a poet and composer based in Brooklyn. He received a B.A. from Yale in 2018, where he studied English and Music and was awarded the Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship in Poetry; that same year he was named a winner of the 2018 Connecticut Poetry Circuit Contest. His writing appears in The Paris Review, Prelude, and The Yale Literary Magazine, among other publications, and his music has been featured in venues across the country and at contemporary music festivals in Europe.