DISAPPOINTMENT AT 9 A.M.
after Wallace Stevens’ “Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock”
The H.O.V. lane is
moving again.
No one sees
what I see, but I see
a thing or two that’s not
true about the people
in the cars merging
to inch past and
past. Not one of them
listens to old sailors
on the radio, no one sprouts antlers,
coffee-drunk, distracted, not a one
mascaras their ruminant
eyelashes. They’ve had enough
of low-speed crashes.
I think they all
know better.
OPOSSUM HOUR
The helicopters flush
them out from underbrush
detritus and underpass cracks to trot
imperiously along
the subdivision walls.
If you were walking home
alone, this is the time of night when you
might take a shortcut through
a back alley somewhere
in Mid-City. You might
hear what sounds like sirens or stray fireworks,
footsteps or the neighbor’s
baby still awake and
singing its ABCs.
You might look up and see a pair of eyes
hovering at chest height
flush and fill with light in
defiance or raised
in ignorance. You might see them bristle
and twitch in the beating
air from overhead. You
might hurry past, you might
take another path, but either way, you’re
getting away alone.
P-41
Your four children, two captured and
two road-murdered,
half-survive you, everywhere fenced
in but never
spotted, only once collared but
often captured
in their motion-activated film
traps, survivor
of brushfire and rat poison, quick
coyote killer,
Sunset Canyon prowler, canny
photogenic
brook-finder, last half-father, old
recluse of the
Verdugos, good watchman of the
210.
Meghan Kemp-Gee writes poetry, comics, and scripts in Los Angeles CA. She won the Poetry Society of America 2014 Lyric Poetry Award. Her work has also appeared in Copper Nickel, Helen: A Literary Magazine, The Rush, Switchback, Stone of Madness, and Skyd Magazine. She teaches written inquiry and composition at Chapman University. You can find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.