winds shifted, sky
blue again, smoke blown
out over the ocean
I can see the hills
make out the detail
of sage and the lichen
spreading. home,
from my porch,
can see clearly
the cut lines
of the shadows
of the pergola, fallen
Originally published by Third Wednesday.
Photo credit: Victor Moragriega.
maybe it is the wet
in my eyes
makes me love
Originally published in the chapbook, “the desert so.”
Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.
It wasn’t 117 that day. Not 120, as had seen, but hot. Hot and uphill.
Afternoon. Punishing blue. Steeply inclined yuppified hills over Menifee. I was one month in, driving a 16-foot van stamped “Prime.”
Had left LAX-9, an Amazon cross-dock, because of the noise level jarring my nerves jagged. One of the noisiest in the nation, was told. Clanking conveyors overhead, west to east across the ceiling, in from Long Beach Harbor, out and throughout our insatiable nation. Seven months building walls out of boxes in semi-trailers bound for other warehouses. They call that job fluid. Someone once asked why, and I said it was because climbing ladders with heavy boxes in metal trailers parked in the Southern California sun, we be melty.
Then three months driving pit. Powered industrial trucks. And I studied hard the ways of the Amazon interview. Applied for the shifter position, they call it. Most call yard dog. Hooking up trailers from trucks. In and out dock doors.
In the quiet outside.
But when they called for interviews, they called men. Men from inbound manual throw. Men from manual palletize. Not me, although I was driving a double-pallet center-rider, more in line with the experience needed for backing trailers into docks, but no account. So, I gave notice. Took a job driving a van for an Amazon third-party delivery.
But on September 20, 2020, it wasn’t 120, as I had seen. Mid-90s. On inclines. The crispy clean were outside minding towheaded toddlers. Not on their green lawns in the low desert, but frolicking concrete cul-de-sacs on top of hills.
So, I parked the Mercedes-Sprinter-Amazon-Dark-Grey-7769-painted van a safe distance and bounded out the door, as well as one can bound in one’s mid-fifties, clad in my thankful-happy-to-have-a-job-of-any-kind-with-health-insurance-and-living-in-California rather than hustling-adjunct-gigs-that-paid-the-same-without-and-living-in-St.-Louis and sticky polyester uniform and slid the side door open. Lifted a box of what seemed might be luxurious shampoo, conditioner, soothing shower gels and lotions. Heavy.
Seemed might be luxury. Definitely heavy.
Instantly, the hill looked steeper. The van was three-quarters full of packages still. Suddenly cognized, intrusively, my age and its increasing by the hour. And it dawned, likely nine hours more before home and showered.
Adjusted again the happy-thankful-polyester I wore and chin-upped. Two steps, I got, ‘til again, I spotted the empty space in front of their house. Uphill. With heavy.
Stopped dead.
One man broke from his quaffed wife porched alongside the neighbor lady wife watching progeny and wave-beckoned a whitened beaming contrasting his deeply tanned welcome my way.
I closed my eyes and thought, God, get me out of this job, straightened my ill-fitting synthetic Pollyanna and again, headed.
As I struggled to put on my facemask, while carrying his wobbly box, he told me there was no need, since he didn’t believe in the virus. I replied that that wouldn’t make any difference, because I could get fired whether or not he believed, from not wearing it, if he turned me in.
Then I stopped short again.
“Hey. You could turn me in. Then I could get fired!”
Smile unaffected.
After the sun went, the pace was the same but that numbing monotony of unendingness that comes from an Amazon related job deadened my suffering. I lifted a light package in gratitude of it and headed to another home on another cul-de-sac atop another hill, walked on the sidewalk along a green lawn, through an arch of tall stucco wall and into a dark but somehow subtly glittering and quietly chiming desert garden that struck me mystic.
Neon has never seemed lovely to me before, but here, cursive words in blue, be still and know I am God, blew coolness.
Faith real.
Floated along untroubled hours until some later in a streetlight-less, dusty, rusty chain-linked nearby neighborhood with hills so steep at times feared flipping that van backwards, I misjudged how many steps were left of someone’s unlit stairs while bustling off their porch.
Fell hard, twisting. Fractured. Pulled. Torn. Hobbled on one leg the eight or so remaining deliveries before my deadline. Pressed the worst of my injuries into the accelerator for 45 minutes back to the shop. Crawled my studio the next two days. Not returned since. Got out of that job. So far, provided for. Someone lent me a grand. Keep getting offers for credit cards and increases. Prayer answered. Limping.
Originally published by Twelve Winters, Volume II, 2022.
Photo credit: Sonny Sixteen.
Was reading another one of those poems that triggers this in me, this filthy resentment I want to rid myself of – – against those who have breakfast at a patio table near the beach, eating croissants and thinking about how deep a Pacific trench is or how the universe is infinite and expanding and the concept of what a trillion dollars might mean, because leisure equals enough space in the mind to ponder things other than how you will pay rent next month when the money runs out since you left the warehouse job at Amazon because of the injury you incurred at work that they say is not work related and how you can’t afford the cigarettes you use to try to soothe, but then feel guilty about, as if the guilt of poverty and all that it implies, or rather, is evidence of, about you is not enough, and I wish this indignation would fly away into the sky like Bezos, left over from when I discovered, or rather, was misinformed, that because my parents had nothing but a shack in a bad neighborhood and a couple of old cars that I never could go to college from my eighth grade guidance counselor who took twenty minutes before he could beat me down, telling me about how there were different types of people in the world, and who had how much and who didn’t have any, that I found to be irrelevant to what I was asking – – what are the best schools of journalism in the nation and do I have to take biology in high school to get into them – – my only two questions that I kept reasserting over and over after dutifully waiting for him to complete, like a good girl, which I was, since I had learned from birth my mother did not love me and I would do anything I could for almost the rest of my life to try to be enough that she would, when I wasn’t defiantly going in entirely the other direction, but he didn’t look up my grades to see all those As nor ask if I was breaking the high school track record for the high jump in my first year of middle school or the state record for the 50-yard dash the year after in gym classes to see how high I would jump or how fast I would run to get out of my neighborhood and the life that came with it since you couldn’t get in a rocket ship from there or sit at a patio table smelling salted air but maybe take orders from those who could, if you managed to fake middle-class enough to get hired since otherwise you might make the customers feel uncomfortable while they were trying to enjoy sumptuousness and discuss philosophical right-brained subjects, and count up the dollars they left on the table and tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have – – so I could manage stillness enough to gaze up and conjecture loftiness and deactivate the neural pathways cast deep and olden as the ocean that cause one’s mind to even come up with the thoughts to begrudge a poem of such loveliness.
Originally published by Eastern Iowa Review.
Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.
in my dream, the one where you were drooling all over the 16-year-old girl behind the counter groaning that reverb into her then moved on to pawing at two skinny sick hustler boy addicts all itchy and scabby needled-tracked mouths all over one another your hands grabbing asses who backed and then flattened into the wall transforming into posters and looked at me with black eyes and I turned to Eric Bogosian waiting at the table for you and he said, “That’s who he is,” after you went to the head without even missing them and that is the same place two men pushed me onto my ass when I was 15 after I dragged a woman from her car across the passenger seat through flames once it was safe enough for them to take the credit for what I had done.
Originally published by Misfit Magazine.
Photo credit: Monica Escalera.
That I will stand, palms atop the four-rail
now finally fully dried, on long planks
painted over burnt orange by oarsman
blue and too the trim of windows
contrasting saffron copper shingle
with century stonework and limber pine
surround and in the rustle of forest litter
on a cloudless afternoon in cherry
billows of chiffon caressing
and in a gap between San Gabriel peaks
will look out onto our Catalina horizon.
O qué piensas
of the deck painted over burnt orange
a muted fern blue and milk paint marigold
trim of windows and framing a sangria door
and leave lovely dusty berry vertical wood.
But of the four-rail, no sé, fern blue too?
No. A navy or something
dark watery.
The black bears, I hear harmless.
Chase them off like stray dogs.
And with spotty cell service
and cut from the cords of the news
will reread One Hundred Years of Solitude
then all the rest of the Marquez I’ve not yet read.
No, no, no es un sueño.
Originally published in, “the desert so,” (out of print).
Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.
Photo credit: Emily.
Photo credit: Nicky Pe.
Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2025.
Photo credit: Jessica Lewis
The Life You Could Have: a memoir 