When Summer Comes
When summer comes to Long Island again
and wild orange lilies are on the roadsides,
we will ride together in your car or mine
to the south shore beaches or the north shore parks,
or your favorite frozen yogurt place and not fret
about our hypoglycemia or getting fat, because love,
when it’s free, increases the appetite for all things sweet—
and we will not need to speak in whispers any more,
nor worry and about being seen hugging in public
or holding hands, because you will leave him
when summer comes, or by next autumn,
and we will have the love we have at last.
Work by Raymond Philip Asaph has appeared in Glimmer Train, Poetry, The Humanist, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Asaph’s good fortunes have included a Stadler undergraduate fellowship to Bucknell University, a Vogelstein grant for poetry, and a graduate fellowship to NYU. His first book, Four Short Stories and Ten Love Poems, is available from Amazon. Off the page, the author goes by “Phil” and can be reached at philasaph@gmail.com.