Foothill Drive

With the gas tank filled just enough to last the intrastate hopping,

our family presses forward into the night

without much thought about being missed

by what happens in the sunniness. 

Baba listens to Mama

and responds as he edges the Honda wheel with his palms

in a way one does 

when checking the pulse of a dead thing.


In the dark,

we pass through the dry foothills

with the scraggly grass veils

pruned colorless at every day’s high noon

like the white hair on a corpse’s chin

and held always

in the lateness of every consecutive nighttime

with a rather omniscient presence,

that is for doing nothing that will ever

last permanently.

It is when the desert sun sets.

Honeying a burnt tongue in a wet saliva mouth.

It is when we gloss what has been done

and think

Let it rest for a while.

Is it not deserved?


The family rides in this Odyssey

in the same meandering movement as

everything that is unsure.


There is no setting in the place we are in

and after all these years

I will ask Baba and Mama

What is a destination? and then I will wait.


The patch of a tousled hair

that is the big question between the Sierra Nevada and the Central Valley.

An unprobed scalp.

A feeling removed.

Ponderosa pines stringing 

along both sides of the highway,

laid as carefully as angel ribbon,

like the outer strands of an

uncommenced braid

or perhaps a braid picked apart so carefully

and flattened to a fragmented origin

so it is something that can be new.

Composed by first being seen as decomposed

by the people who saw the core before there was fruit.

On the foothills,

on the road in its absences,

we glance at the raised dirt slabs as I imagine 

What if there was a giant’s butcher knife that had parted this dirt 

and we are just whatever muck that crawled out of it?

I look up like there is something beyond us on a raised stage.

A slice of what holds roots.

On a drive-by where violence doesn’t count as violence,

we crouch there,

wither-intended poppies who marvel the proud footloose

and, if we crouch there for long enough,

maybe soil will begin to fill our socks with a living thing.

On this foothill drive

to Grandfather’s funeral,

my Mama tells about the family

like a narrator and just that.

Those who we somehow don’t talk to much anymore

and those who don’t shut up.

Those who saw the war and those who felt it on bluing flesh.

Those who were the negligible splinters

on the ocean raft who, in a way, 

encapsulated the happening.

My thirty-eight-year-old

fucked up Bic-Razor cousin born with the Eureka seal

who is home, now, smoking pot in PoPo’s

bathroom with the wrung adult diapers still dripping

from water in the peony-pattern tub.

He thinks of high school.

A VHS tape paused mid-cascade and pre-avalanche.

He dumps a glass of water over PoPo’s head

and watches the clear liquid break around

her like a closing bulb.

PoPo sits there blinking fast,

not muttering much.

A glass with a hand still closed over it.

One of the aunts. The knife.

The desire to scream Run! Run! Run so I don’t have to.

The family in Little Saigon and the Sacramento home.

The one who saw and the one who threw

and the knife that speared into the off-white wall

and landed in the wood

in a shape of a dead mouth sewn 

with smile lines.

The cousin dressed wrongly

in the unerodible nest with no care to give ourselves.

He lights the blunt.

The corpse in the pine tree that fell.

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The Most Beautiful Moment in the World

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Comfort