Heat does most of the work in Orrin Schwab's "July," and it starts in the first line: "the air smokes." Air doesn't normally smoke. Pavement or a fire does. By lending the air that verb, the poem makes the whole atmosphere seem to burn, and the second line, "steamed in the sun," confirms it. The sun becomes "that ruthless god / who burns pavement / and milky white skin," a figure who punishes stone and flesh alike. The city is drawn as a body that has just come out of a long winter, "after the ice and wind of three seasons," and is now being cooked back to life by "the sky with its / hot belt."
The poem's central idea is that the summer heat strips the city down and shows what is alive in it and what is not. The third stanza turns to the industrial parts of town, "scraped of rust," that "bare" themselves to the streets. The language here is full of the body and the clinic: "cauterized," "deep muscle," "purview." Old factories become "artifacts," left behind by the highways, "in solitude praying to the digital photons / of the next" century. It's an odd and rather sad picture of obsolete machinery as a worshipper, hoping to be noticed by a future that has no interest in it.
The bodies on the street get the same exposed treatment. The girls "strip / to their figures," and the male is "caught in his blood / in the -physiology of his hormones / pounding his frame." The cold, scientific word "physiology" against the pounding of blood makes desire sound like something that happens to a man, not something he chooses. Even the stray hyphen in front of "physiology" looks like a small slip in the text, as if the sentence itself has been overheated. Calling him simply "the male" makes him a specimen, and the speaker seems to be watching with detached curiosity.
The sharpest contrast comes in the two final stanzas. The skyscrapers touch the sky "with steel etchings / in the language of the future," and what they send out are "furtive echoes" that "return unanswered." That is a bleak image of a modern skyline speaking confidently into empty space. Set against it are "the old neighborhoods," which "live in / the steamy air with the hot talk of / the summer." The towers have a "language," but the neighborhoods have "talk," and the word choice favors the second. Their life is communal, noisy and repeated daily, which the poem lays out in the closing list of participles: "churning / sleeping / dreaming / dying." Each night the neighborhood's vapor settles in "long deep mounds," and each morning it is "again reborn."
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Without full stops, one image runs into the next, much as the heat blurs the edges of everything. Line lengths shift constantly, from the clipped "the air smokes" to the long, drifting lines of the last stanza, which seem to stretch like the night they describe. The sounds support the theme too: the repeated *s* in "steamed in the sun," "sifting," "steel," "soft" and "sleeping" gives the poem a faint hiss, like steam escaping. The enjambment is often abrupt. "takes the dark clouds / off the prairie / from that ruthless god" is syntactically slippery, so that it's unclear who is taking what from whom. That vagueness suits a poem in which sun, city and land press on one another.
Part of what makes "July" worth reading is that it refuses the usual summer-in-the-city postcard. The lake and the prairie suggest a northern city, but the poem never names it, and the specific place matters less than the pattern. A city is judged by what survives its hottest season. The poem's answer is not the steel and the digital future but the old, sweaty, talkative blocks that die each dawn and come back again. The last two words, "again reborn," are slightly redundant, but the repetition feels like the point, because the neighborhoods have to keep being reborn over and over.