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Excerpt
from
Tracings
You'll Think You're Reading Prose
When You Read Tracings
Main page for Tracings
Tracings' Reviews
 
Tracings was
named to the Compulsive Readers' Ten Best Reads list.
and given the
Military Writers' Society of America's Award of Excellence
and Dawn Colclasures 50 Top Reads at Palms to Pines.
Perfectly Flawed
Minute by mango
colored minute
the sky changes, high
clouds whipped
like meringue by
astral winds,
the undersides singed
by a persimmon
orb settling into the
Pacific. I drive
west at 4:30. Saved
daylight.
This blush fleeting,
in transit.
I should exit at the
Sepulveda ramp,
pull over to give this
display
full attention. Down
there, though, among
buildings and trees
the view will be reduced
to an overhead tint.
The freeway’s elevation,
flawed as it is,
stokes these fireworks; bumper
threatens bumper,
Hondas, SUVs,
battered gardeners’
trucks grab
attention from the
brilliance
before me. It is 1940.
I settle into my uncle’s
arms, he on his way to
pilot B42s.
something about the
Blitz something I know,
must be related to
lightning, to the undersides
of clouds tinged with
fire. He leaves behind
his new Buick, celery
colored with peek-a-boo holes
in its side, I, too,
soon discarded
to my mother’s pale
hand. I am required
to make him happy, a
child’s duty. They don’t
know that my blown
kiss will be remembered,
stick like early stars
to the inverted sides of a huge
aqua glass bowl, that
nothing can be better than the smell
of his Barbasol, his
warmth beneath pressed
khaki, his breath
sending smoke signals into the twilight.
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