Sometime in the last week August remembered itself and began changing. This is not a month obvious with new beginnings. It doesn’t announce itself with bright resolutions or an accounting of all that has been figured out. It writes itself in twigs and sprinkler water. It explodes from its own fullness: the split pod, the swollen tomato, the echinacea’s violet paper bent back like wings from a gilded heart.

It’s all too much.

I stand barefoot in my nightgown, yellow grass harsh against my toes and watch the sky grow pink in early morning. The house, unused to sun-colored earth, seems to float. Are there things to do? Did I have ambition? It melts into one impulse: to walk through the garden with my arms full of poppies, to shake them until their dry rattle is all I can hear.

Photography and text © Iskra Johnson