CLEAR HISTORY

I’ve seen Runyon in all its browns, temporary yellows,
greens, and each photograph captures one
only, unlike the mind. 1,607 LAX flights, and not a crack
in afternoon sky, just dimming blue, an ocean reflection,
a lightening breeze and two palm species swaying over
Rudy’s entryway skylight. The ebb and flow of a couple,
trying to coax their dog along the sidewalk, walking
ahead, turning and barking, how narrow our
imperatives grow, and I hadn’t even been thinking
about typing, that most erasable of denotations. I
suppose I have been this man, regardless of what can be
said of me. It’s beading on my brow.

AUTONOMY

I picture myself a certain calm, the recumbent calyx
arching toward municipal loop, the Hoover Recreation
Center, where I voted for a different set of years. I
imagine, looking at the dusty stage, the productions we
might have supported. If this were a press conference,
each cup would be suspect, but instead it’s a Thursday I
imagined taking on new light, a light I could not imagine
from previous palliative frames. I walked four miles
today, and I identified two trees. Each was outside a
house, each house with a boarded window—I have two
boarded windows—and they certainly make the people
inside feel safe against the beautiful weather and
narrow sidewalks. I keep my feet.

HUMANELY RAISED PORK RIBS

This café evolves into café—exposed brick, + signs for
ands, lamb and pork meatballs, local avocado toast for
loafers and sneakers, your art on the wall. I can’t find
the playing cards, but the air is thick. At the mall, for
instance, I try not to read too much into the fabric used
for covering a pelvis, though I can’t help but be molded,
counter-molded, by the present speech. There’s an
adage about young and old in politics, but I’m not sure
the adage holds, either clause, under the weight of my
dozenth trip through Utah, my favorite orange.
Hambone and wienies, my mother’s split pea soup
recipe. If it’s citrus you want, my neighbor’s trees seem
to say, you’ve arrived, three blocks south of Koreatown
behind a fence.

BIO: Thomas Cook is the author of the forthcoming collection Light Through a Pane of Glass. Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Poetry South, Chattahoochee Review, and New World Writing. He lives in Los Angeles, California and Galesburg, Illinois.