Judith Skillman The Front Sixty days without rain and you stand in the yard, surrounded by black leaves, the cough of an animal, and wind. You thought summer would be enough but it wasn't in the way nothing is ever enough. No gift ends the wanting. Sixty dry days in a wet place, even the bamboo creeping back into itself, crisped and yellowed. You the dowager, the widow, the soul adventure-starved in Paradise. When the purple cloud comes from west southwest, barometer bird tipped, swilling red liquid, all you crave is the past. Nostalgia— a number, a figure, a figment? What of girl- hood didn't you get? Hooted at, whistled, cat-called. Nick-named, exposed to, molested. Toward what version of erotica does bad weather beckon? Day dreams? Fictions? Sixty days as in the desert, and you don't dare to abandon the mattress, the jewelry—to go back alone by plane to all the ways chalk changes color from pink to pale to night.

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