Young Writers Society

Knees knocking on doors

21. kohl

There was a five dollar buffet going on and
you were in town. You had a thing for
floral prints and slim silk scarves like
spiderwebs you'd hang around your white neck.
I could hear your knees knocking whenever
you settled down to eat.

I watch as you reach into your bra cup
to pull out a money clip, poking out
in plain view, and you met my gaze
briefly, smiling your dark Nile smile
from across the table.

And for a time I could see us
dancing by the river,
the flowers of ritual blooming and
dying at our feet.

22. Crises

This art is failing me.
I lose
myself in the abstract print
and trace the residual in the blank wall.
I see complementaries.

So.
I raise the barista
behind the clicking of
morning grasshoppers.

They know
the slim walls of dormitories,
their secret eyes.

They can hold up
their frames, the brushwork
of canvas kids who know
the layout of pastel fronts like
our endless country.

23. passion is

blue, like
physics, collision imminent. rumbling
shrubs twitching brush fires

into the air. the swerving of plates
on faultline highways. instant,
the sex of flies, the birth
of quarks. know that i will write

a manifesto in impassioned dots.
they will be read like a constellation in
the night sky, bright impressions, pencil stuff.
they are shapes of gods, vase-like, trampled by
the stuttering of elephantine galaxies

stumbling over a yawning ebon, which is
passion, physics. a voice for this poem,
deeper than image; a pale girl in
a black dress, eyes roving, momentum caught
and mastered, a measured unit of passion,
possession. passion, like the legs of

the waking universe, stretching
faster than daylight, slow as eternity. passion,
wading eternally in the beaches

born from the breath of volcanoes.

-



24. Cushions

Underneath the peeling black,
gray stuff is aroused, reaching
for nearby dandelions from
the safety of visible springs.

We have considered it for years, like
a child we had given away, a thing of
evil just shedding its skin for purgatory.
The night has made it a mountain,

a cutout in the velvet sky, a shadow of
the shadow of earth. In its fractal prison,
dreams stagnate, scratching at the cushioned walls
where white stuff is hidden in abundance,

and gray is never found. On it, the pressing of bodies,
briefly, the heat of stars having seared

new, shy shapes out of the horizon.

25. Letters to California #2

There's a library I go to near my house,
right by the city court, a small place
enclosed by trees. I only recently went to
the other library, a newer, more modern spot
on the other side of town. It sits at

the highest point in the city, with
high-ceilinged windows looking out into
the valley where the sun rises on the right hand
and sets on the left. A park bustles below
the library, like a rug beneath the bushy slope.
It is nice, but

never bike home from there;
it will quickly turn to night,
and the hills become steeper.

26. anthropologist

all of these are on loan:
sapphic profiles, infinite curvature, coastal
convergence on intimate reefs
and distant
seagulls like memories of kisses.
i hand her the skull.
she spreads her mango
fingers over the ridge,
cupping the jaw, puffing
questions between the teeth.

27. little mercutio

mother was a fire hydrant, she said hush and
we did, because there was no free parking.

i was always the dog or the shoe (but
i secretly wanted to be the battleship),

and i would later lose all my property, hands
holding my face and bending backwards

on my knees. mother was a player,
she would rake in the paper and say

"montagues and capulets", because
she used to do shakespeare in high school

and thought her in-jokes were hilarious. but
we, her children, her friends, could only smile and

say "aye".

anthropologist is fabulous; that ending, in particular.

28. community center

Benches, the color of telephone booth green.
Be seated.

Block pillars, calico sunset,
cascade of face, shade
of shrugging trees,
breeze.

Open car,
Herbie Hancock record, rusty
needle, cameled horizon
bearing drops of cloud.
Saddlebags, spilled.
Picked up. Cherry picker
in next-door fire station, conducting
sloth over firetrucks.
Chucks.

City of cellulose, reclining
in sienna. Raisin farmfields
hanging to dry, clipped to the skysline.

29. chaparral meta

I did not write my thanks on the back of playbills.

See,
I wrote poetry in the margins,
between the glaring misprints.

At the restaurant, I had the tip, remember,
in an open palm beneath the conch of ceiling light.
Just outside, the blue-eyed bum, on decal heavy bike, he had one.
I gave him my reading.

I had no time
for the gratefulness of excitable beats,
recollections of front row seats, stuttered pamphlets.
No time for pianissimo of continued night.
Give me a medal, accolades, the steady dynamics of
graduation day lacking crescendo.
I will go with my baton, with my nike elegies,
as the emissary of Marathon kicking the night.