This piece appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Weather, No. 24
To receive the Quarterly Journal, become a member or purchase at our bookstore.
In the weeks after I left I waited
for someone a friend or her herself to walk
quickly up to me on the bus
or in the artisanal coffee shop and slap
my face spit on my hands call
me a bastard a real motherfucker by
weeks I mean the better part
of a year and by waited I mean I wanted
to be revealed by some visible sign
of my wretchedness a welt
to ride the ledge of my cheekbone
through the shit-spackled streets
of San Francisco a city ruined
by money and incomparably
beautiful it didn’t come and it didn’t
come and I grew desperate I stared
too long at strangers at Safeway I bought
boxes of clementines and ate them
like a possum on the train cramming
the rinds in the gap between the seat
and the wall I drank dark beer I made
no calls I sat on a hot metal bench
by a briny lake and tried
to imagine the lives of the joggers
passing in front of me their joys
their sicknesses and regrets it was
melodramatic I was useless I thought
of my friend who wrote a novel over
a long winter in Nova Scotia
read it once and buried it in the copse
of birches behind the house he chose
the spot he said for its plainness
so he couldn’t remember later
and dig it up and in this way one
medicated season slid into the next
without incident gardenia bloom
persistent sun I fell in love
with the perfect voice of a Midwest
radio DJ from a station I streamed
on my phone called in one request
after another I fell in love with a video
of Stevie Nicks singing backstage
to her makeup artist sheer
cotton dress their harmonies breezy
and immaculate I woke around noon
to the thup-thup of helicopters went out
in my underwear and found a fine
black powder settling on the windowsills
dusting the parked cars a day moon
suspended in orange haze it turned out
a man who would go months without
getting caught was methodically burning
the half-built condo complexes one
by one one in ten thousand residents
is a billionaire the same article
told me though I could be forgiven
for thinking the headlands were on
fire again the intervals between
such disasters collapsing I caught
my neighbor’s eye who was stretching
on her stoop in a fantastic powder-blue
tracksuit what a world I said and she didn’t
seem to hear and jogged down the steps
and across the narrow street that stubborn
moon behind her rising or sinking
or neither it was hard to know
Edgar Kunz is the author of Tap Out (Mariner/HMH, 2019), a NYT New & Noteworthy book.
To receive the Quarterly Journal, become a member or purchase at our bookstore.
¤
DAY MOON
In the weeks after I left I waited
for someone a friend or her herself to walk
quickly up to me on the bus
or in the artisanal coffee shop and slap
my face spit on my hands call
me a bastard a real motherfucker by
weeks I mean the better part
of a year and by waited I mean I wanted
to be revealed by some visible sign
of my wretchedness a welt
to ride the ledge of my cheekbone
through the shit-spackled streets
of San Francisco a city ruined
by money and incomparably
beautiful it didn’t come and it didn’t
come and I grew desperate I stared
too long at strangers at Safeway I bought
boxes of clementines and ate them
like a possum on the train cramming
the rinds in the gap between the seat
and the wall I drank dark beer I made
no calls I sat on a hot metal bench
by a briny lake and tried
to imagine the lives of the joggers
passing in front of me their joys
their sicknesses and regrets it was
melodramatic I was useless I thought
of my friend who wrote a novel over
a long winter in Nova Scotia
read it once and buried it in the copse
of birches behind the house he chose
the spot he said for its plainness
so he couldn’t remember later
and dig it up and in this way one
medicated season slid into the next
without incident gardenia bloom
persistent sun I fell in love
with the perfect voice of a Midwest
radio DJ from a station I streamed
on my phone called in one request
after another I fell in love with a video
of Stevie Nicks singing backstage
to her makeup artist sheer
cotton dress their harmonies breezy
and immaculate I woke around noon
to the thup-thup of helicopters went out
in my underwear and found a fine
black powder settling on the windowsills
dusting the parked cars a day moon
suspended in orange haze it turned out
a man who would go months without
getting caught was methodically burning
the half-built condo complexes one
by one one in ten thousand residents
is a billionaire the same article
told me though I could be forgiven
for thinking the headlands were on
fire again the intervals between
such disasters collapsing I caught
my neighbor’s eye who was stretching
on her stoop in a fantastic powder-blue
tracksuit what a world I said and she didn’t
seem to hear and jogged down the steps
and across the narrow street that stubborn
moon behind her rising or sinking
or neither it was hard to know
¤
Edgar Kunz is the author of Tap Out (Mariner/HMH, 2019), a NYT New & Noteworthy book.
LARB Contributor
Edgar Kunz is the author of Tap Out (Mariner/HMH, 2019), a NYT New & Noteworthy book. His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches at Goucher College and in the Newport MFA.
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