If you grew up in a small town, especially one where August was the hottest and dustiest month of the year, you became very familiar with your public pools. My friend Aaron was one of those lucky kids with a three-month pool pass. Every weekday morning of every summer, his mother would pack him a lunch and send him down to catch the bus for the pool at 10am. I’d join him sometimes. We’d meet friends and splash around for hours, pool our dimes for fries at the snack shack, and get yelled at a dozen times by the lifeguards. And every day ended the same way: you’d look up at some point in the afternoon to find you’d spent more than half the day at the pool, and it was nearly time to catch the bus back home.
I did this again recently, spending Sunday at a friend’s house for a pool party. It’s different now - being the adult who’s telling the kids to stop running, eating as many chips as I want - but I found myself experiencing that exact same moment from when I was a kid: looking up to find you’d spent half the day at the pool, and it was already time to head home.
It's the last week of August and our theme this month has been smoke. Today, Diana Forgione reads a poem by Paul Valery called “A Distinct Fire.” Influenced by Poe and Goethe, Valery’s relatively small body of poetry and prose was nominated for the Nobel Prize a dozen times, and his work served as an inspiration to artists like Hayao Miyazaki and Cormac McCarthy.
Our guest this August 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.
