August is the Sunday of summer months. The last chance to cram in camping trips or swimming in the river. Historically, it’s also the hottest month of the year in the northern hemisphere, a good time to hole up during the heat of the day and a great time to stay up past your bedtime, after the sun has set, as some of the year’s most active meteor showers peak in August.
But August will always remind me of my grandmother. In the garden or the kitchen, mostly, picking raspberries or apples, cooking and blending up rhubarb or apricots. Pouring the fruit jam onto cookie sheets to dry in the oven for rolls of fruit leather, making the whole house smell like a strawberry patch in the sun.
Today, Diana Forgione reads a poem by Jaye Elizabeth Elijah called “Fire Danger High Today.” Elijah is a poet and editor-at-large for Nightboat Books. Their work has appeared in The Counter, beestung, Earth in Color, Journal Safar, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.
Our guest this month is Diana Forgione, sharing work on the theme of smoke. Forgione is a poet, writer, and editor whose work can be found in Homology Lit, Reality Beach, and Cobra Milk among other places. They are the Co-Founder of Death Rattle Literary, Head Editor for OROBORO, and a judge and workshop instructor for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
Something I Heard is supported by Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
