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.