Buon giorno, 
my Jupiters, 
my little pagan luminants, 
pale moons of the summer dawn, 
auras glowing white-not-white-but-green, 
my ghostlings, 
floating. 

Fruits, you were flowers first, 
then pampered phosphorescent spheres
a shade so sheer 
a flashlight might beam through you. 

Do you, ripening, 
distill each orange ray of June, 
extract carnelian from the clay? 
How do you reap the red? 
And how expand 
into your bright bal-
looniness? 
How do you hang so heftily—
yet want to rise? 

O, bulbous ones, O, foolery! 
Twenty-two clown noses 
levitate out my back door. 
O, fun galore! You are the party 
on the patio, bobbing 
to the swelter of the eve, 

swollen in the sweetness of, 
splitting in the brimful of,  
the sprawl of, 
all of, 
August 
on the brink of the fall. 

Kelli Logan Rush’s poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, the Connecticut River Review and Plainsongs, among other journals.