Qualm

Iridescent green flies on the dog shit scatter when I walk by.

I’ve never seen flies so vivid. Gorgeous, these shit-flies.

Someone sits on a park bench with head in hands.

A plot of ornamental grasses bends in resigned unison.

Helicopters overhead, how they move

like spirits with no conscience.

 

*

Patience. Rage and being told “be patient.”

The birds with orange heads and dust-colored bodies bob on the powerlines.

The poet explains a patient is “one who suffers.”

Beneath the underpass, a chair overturned in the fenced-in weeds

toward which a misplaced tenderness arises.

 

*

Each night, she says, and most mornings, refugees arrive.

Then ship off to Athens. Why would they want to stay, there’s nothing here.

 

*

Fog descended from the Pacific;

I took a bath with my biggest rock. A deity,

ancient, severe, rolling around in the bottom of the tub.

 

*

Nothing: a bookstore, a lotto place run by cousins, two bakeries, one

university, donated used baby clothes well-meaningly folded

and stacked, one detention center in the capital

road sign with the capital’s distance in kilometers spray painted FUCK

 

*

Where one bright aperture in the cloud has closed up

inner tubes and shoes and life vests on the shore.

My mother lives above this beach. She watches them.

 

*

After being asked for money by five separate people

an office supply truck passes, GIVE SOMETHING BACK across it.

I give five dollars to Ceci.

I gave two dollars to someone earlier, but he seemed disappointed.

I sit on a sunny curb in the parking lot, feeling useless, like a teenager.

Ha, who is American! my mother asks bitterly.

One of us looks down at the other.

Palm tree in the distance with the hair of a rocker dude.

 

*

My mother said fight.

She said they used to call her “the little Spañola.”

 

*

Photographs of water, like case studies.

How far away from yourself would you say you get?

When I swim the first time, I cannot call it pleasure.

‘Them’ here feels violent to me.

 

*

Three kids in the chilly light

of a convenience store’s back entrance

visible from the highway

between one California and another.

One squats looking at a phone,

two lean and smoke. Slouch

of interminable suburbia

interminable crap-jobs at fifteen

a flash, momentary as toward the city

we continue. As we do.

 

*

Four old paint drips

on the windowpane I look

at, not through.

Four old punctuation marks

a nearing helicopter cuts across.

I refuse to detail the humiliations that keep me up at night.

I am pulling a blanket over my head.

Or, I’m elated by 30 seconds of rain.

 

*

At the laundromat

churchlike, fastidiously polite,

I pair socks at the high counter,

plastic marbled to resemble marble

black, white, and blue.

A woman claims a whole row of washers

spacing five hefty trash bags

at even intervals, looking tired.

Here our delicates.

I sit down she gets up.

A stranger I want to convey kindness to.

The day opens like a compact,

mirror on one side

powder on the other.

- Ari Banias