Sweater Weather

JP Legarte, United States

As I rollerblade down this street
past interspersed gas stations
and the tempting, local ice cream parlor,
the once radiating streams of latched sunlight
corkscrew into comforting tailwinds
pouring over my blurred body.

Anticipation is green blankets
of warmed leaves bleeding into maroon
pockets decorating fallen branches,
the soft moonlight flickering between
checkered suburbs earlier in the dying evening.

Even adaptation materializes
in tank tops turning into oversized sweatshirts
and soaring birds migrating for the seasons ahead,
the increasing headlights barely illuminating
their fleeting shadows under purple sunsets.

Embedded within my own distracted
ponderings, I reach the cul-de-sac
at the end of the faded grey road,
wondering how time within transitions so often mirrors
my brief excursion these past ten minutes,

ephemeral in its nature of embodying
a singular moment yet assuring as
it stretches awareness of the present
onto the doorsteps of future possibilities.

JP Legarte is a Filipino-American junior at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working toward a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and an English minor. He desires to provide spaces through his poetry where others can process their own emotions, ponderings, and anything else within life itself. His poems have been previously published or are forthcoming in Poetry Undressed, Behind the Vision, Words & Whispers, Ice Lolly Review, and The Global Youth Review among other journals and magazines. You can find him on Instagram at @jpl091 and @unspokenentropy.