Knife Blade

Before you get to the 101,

there’s a cut-off –

A road like a spliced limb,

frayed denim kitchen zipper

pointing south:

we went down fly,

not to Lakeport, but –

Bodies and roads alike are halved

as messily as overripe tomatoes.

Coloring outside the lines,

bleeding over the clean incision,

a cutting board long-scarred

like the Hollywood Freeway

and its delusions of symmetry.

(Even what is coarse

like an old pair of jeans ends in

spindly soft threads dangling

across freshly shaven thighs,

smooth fingernails digging

into a man's stubble, even Venice Beach

with its tattoo artists and grit

turns warm sand,

meddling between toes,

invading covert seams.)

Errata

Lover who lives

in the vellum of your skin,

in the soft tissues of your belly –

I am apologizing now

for different things than I did then.

I am forgiving you

for asking me to relieve you

of the weight of our failure.

I am uninhabiting my own bare feet

on the wood floor of that

crooked house on the hill.

I am no longer speaking to the jumble:

shadowy peacock woman,

floating red bikini,

recollection of a brassy voice
and of mischief laughing in your irises.

I am telling you now,
I should have known that there are losses
more painful than death.

August in Northern California

always means wildfires

and you and I went out in

four glorious days of burning.

I should have known because that last night

you watched me intently and wondered,
as if to the relics of smoke in the air,

who will you be when you come back?

I should have known then that people sometimes

vanish in their own survival.
That people are sometimes
unrecognizable in their own renewal,
and that I had never seen your rootedness.

I am sorry I did not understand that

imputation was to blame

when you insisted,
I am less now than I was before.

I am sorry for believing

that the afternoon we spent helping those men

push my car onto a log to unstick it from the curb 
and laughing in the wine shop afterward

was proof that the before-you was coming back,

that it was only a matter of waiting for her to re-surface.

I am not apologizing now, as I did then,

for refusing to make small-talk in the kitchen,

for the withdrawal that matched yours,

for the whole slow death of us.
In these silences that follow silences,
I am apologizing now for refusing to grieve
your and my losses
of that woman.

Headlight

Dinner at a greasy Thai restaurant

in San Luis Obispo, where the

streets seem too blissful

and escape is in a Shell station

just outside downtown

It is not a long drive down on the 101

cars sliding through darkness,

crossing the grapevine before ripening,

flitting across lanes to the 134,

the bone marrow quiet of driving alone at night

Stoplight at that empty intersection and realizing

the last time I felt my body

it was unfurling in a rest stop parking lot.

Corner coffee shop where the masochist predicted
my lust would turn to pain - 

Dampness on the stairs outside the house,

a rain I had just missed made me think I started losing limbs

a long, long time before the In N Out in Camarillo.

She ran into the living room

to embrace me, stood staring for a moment

at her feet in shock,

my fingers were still lingering in that

Highway 101 darkness and under her

tree lights I was still palpitating, scentless like last summer.

New California Writing 2013

Thanks to the bilingual online news magazine, ChicoSol.org, my poem "California Was Never Kansas" will be published this spring in New California Writing 2013, which you can check out here: https://heydaybooks.com/book/new-california-writing-2013/. ChicoSol submitted the piece for consideration to the anthology last spring, and I recently learned that it had been selected for publication. This year's contributors include Joan Didion, Robert Hass, Gustavo Arellano, Susan Straight, and David Rains Wallace; needless to say, it is a huge honor to be featured in the same collection as these folks. My work hasn't been anthologized since I was 14, when my essay "Across the River" was published in Mexico, A Love Story, so it feels good to be experiencing the vulnerability that comes with sharing one's work again.

You can read the ChicoSol version of the poem here.

Ripe Brush

Roundabout on a day like this:

16^th of November coming and coming fast,

dizzy on the streets like fingers of a fan

Every day I walked to France and back,

Los Angeles gleaming at the corner

in Le Jacaranda, scentless lilac blossoms

long since dead and pressed but not velvety

(The day of that plaza passed

in rain dripping from the eaves of

bright cafés and pooling in

drunk desert tiles dipping with

the recollection of what it’s like to be a sea)

November’s scent was black palm soap,

the oil in my hair, sweat and sunscreen,

the French perfumes that clung to me in the new city.

November’s sound was the 6 AM call to prayer,

when you woke and brushed the edges of your feet

with a stream of water running fragile in the sink

You made circles around Koutoubia at sundown,

theorized the clicking of men’s tongues,

waited for me in the garden where I found you

after the roundabout on a day like this:

fumes drifting out from behind the airbag,

six thousand miles later, I said to you,

I think I need to get out –

Temple throbbing and you still smell like soap,

yet another garden heavy with brush ripe for wildfire,

trees yearning to burn,

up here August brings the

new year, scorched acres and

this scarred body,

flattened and withering,

begging like this summer’s basil to be brought inside

Suffocating September and burning flags in Casablanca,

day eleven of the month and four fires in California.