by Katie Olson Afshar

Sonny Nguyen, *Untitled,* digital photograph, 2024. Courtesy of Unsplash.

Heatwave

Katie Olson Afshar |July 2025 | Issue 47

We eat crackers and watermelon for dinner
three days in a row—too hot to cook.
Once my usual pleasure, coffee—caffeine’s mood lift,
now unthinkable, my heart’s already beating fast enough
every blood vessel dilated—making space for the heat.

Plants whimper green panic in the yard.
So hot the breeze is dangerous and insects show up in new places
beetles I’ve never seen upside down in the living room
legs gyrating. Termites swarm one at a time from the baked dirt.

To escape, the baby juncos we’ve doted on
fledge too early, a frantic father bird can’t prod them to fly
or save them from the cat who has vomited her first
into a patch of sunlight.
Nobody cleans the body off the porch.

It’s too hot to let our own bodies touch.
To comfort is to stay away from each other.
You think it can’t get worse but the mountains have caught fire.
The sky will soon be brown
and after dark our child won’t sleep

so we’re up listening to the sick silence
of a neighborhood heated into stillness
ice packs pressed to our hearts, fans whirring,
minutes slowed to a stop, time
leaning back in a chair, waiting.

Katie Olson Afshar is a writer and pediatrician. Her work has appeared in the Sun, Catamaran Literary Reader, RockPaperPoem and Hunger Mountain, with work forthcoming in One Art. She lives in the California Bay Area with her husband, daughter and an anxious goat named Baby Moon.