California

Coastlines

Teow Lim Goh

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 - 09:15

The ocean encircles a lone peak.

Rough terrain surrounds this prison.

There are few birds flying over the cold hills.

The wild goose messenger cannot find its way.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a Chinese immigrant carved this poem on the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. It was unsigned, one of many.

Instead of Flowers

Michael Caylo-Baradi

Thursday, March 21, 2013 - 11:53

Usually 4 p.m. glares on my windshield as I head to the Hollywood Hills Forest Lawn Memorial Park. I am 75 miles per hour on the 134, maybe more. Others fly by me, impatient. The temptation to catch up to them is strong, as always. But I stay below the eighties, as though the seventies are the right glide, on Lenny Kravitz tunes. At the exit, flower vendors on foot wave roses and chrysanthemums. Their nearest competition is the flower shop at the gate, less than a mile away. You’d think they’d sell for bargain. But I buy a bunch or two anyway. It beats walking to the shop, and ringing for someone to come out when you’re ready to pay.

Poem With Snowy Plovers

Brian Simoneau

Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - 14:22

April’s only days
away. The wind strokes
sandstone cliffs, the cove
empty except for
snowy plovers.
A grain of sand
brings tears. An ocean
is beautiful
in its cruelty—last
week, currents swept
someone out to sea—
so I’m watching
for rogue waves, don’t
notice the puddle
that soaks my shoe.
I’m able to laugh
at almost all of it.
Squinting against

Antiquing in the Desert

Aaron Gilbreath

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 16:19

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

In The West

Michael Leslie

Wednesday, September 7, 2011 - 08:10

I remember how the air smelled, of eucalyptus and the Pacific. I was sitting under green corrugated fiberglass panels in an open-air classroom a mile from Santa Monica beach when President Kennedy got shot in the head and neck. Dallas was my hometown, and I started fourth grade back at the scene of that crime. A year later, we moved again, this time to New Hampshire.

But who could forget the Pacific Ocean? I returned to it as a teenager, riding my thumb out of New England in the late sixties, when all the young dudes were on the road.

After Rain

Brian Simoneau

Monday, July 18, 2011 - 13:31

The wind comes warm as breath
and stirs me like laundry
on a line. Then it’s gone. Life
weaves itself together
from next to nothing;
it’s all these moments
I want, to take them in
before they’re taken away.
A patch of blue breaches clouds
the way green comes to winter
and the black of a raven’s
something I can hardly stand
the beauty of: unshadowed
or itself a shadow
untethered from things. It coasts