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.
“When I see anyone laughing, I just think, don’t you know? How can you laugh? How can people walk around laughing and carrying on like that?”
“Oh, come on.”
“Seriously. Think about it. It’s sick.”
“Please. You should know better than anyone. None of it will matter. In the end. Right?”
“But just think of the dolphins. That should keep anyone from laughing.”
“Stop.”
“They say all the fish in the ocean could be gone in forty years. Just jellyfish! That’s all. That’s all that will be left. And that’s bad. That’s really bad. But when I think of the starving dolphins … washing up on shore? Can you imagine? My god. And the whales. That just gets to me. The dolphins and the whales. That really gets me.”
“You should know better than anyone. None of it matters. In the end. Tell me again.”
“What?”
“Tell me. About the one thing you know for sure.”
“What. Oh, that? From the accident? Jesus. You already heard that.”
“Not in detail, I don’t think. Not everything, Tell me again.”
Groan.
“Tell me.”
“Jesus.” The leaning-in anticipation weakened her. “Okay. So. Imagine a black room.”
“Yeah?”
“The blackest black.”
“Yeah.”
“Black ceiling. Black walls. No windows.”
Nodding.
“Black floor. Imagine the darkest black you’ve ever seen.”
“Got it.”
“Now, imagine, in the black room, you close your eyes. Blacker still.”
Eyes close.
“Then you cover your closed eyes. Nothing blacker. Right?”
“Right.”
“It was darker than that.”
Open.
“I don’t know how else to say it. It was darker than the darkest black I can even imagine.”
“But not scary.”
“Not scary in the least.”
“That’s nice.”
“It was nice.”
She relaxed back into her seat some.
“And then you heard the voice?”
“Not right away, but I didn’t hear a voice, because I didn’t have ears. I knew I didn’t have a body. But that was later. The voice.”
“First, you struggled.”
“Yes. For a long time. I felt like I was suffocating. And I was fighting. I mean, I thought I was fighting, like, I was trying to swim, or get loose from whatever was suffocating me, but then it dawned on me, I wasn’t under water, there was nothing, like, I wasn’t tangled in a bunch of comforters or something. I wasn’t even moving. I couldn’t move. I had no arms. To fight. I had no arms to fight with. But I was still struggling to breathe anyway, but just, in my mind. And, eventually … Damn.” She knotted her brow deeply. “That was so awful. I hate remembering that part.”
“Skip ahead then.”
“Well. Yeah. Anyway, at some point it just dawned on me that I wasn’t suffocating, because it had been too long and I should have passed out by then. Right?”
Nod.
“And then it just stopped. The struggle. Sudden. Over. Like, you know, when, after labor? Once you give birth. And you see the baby?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know if any of yours were hard labor. Like, hard.”
“My first.”
“Yeah. My first too; twenty-two hours. Hard. All the way from the first contraction. Like, the first contraction was six minutes long. And full-on.”
Disbelief.
“Seriously. I’m not shitting you. I called Penny, to ask, you know? Because it seemed really hard. And it’s not supposed to start like that. And she stayed on the phone with me, asking questions, and her mom was in the background, and when, and one came and she timed it. And I came back on the phone after, and she said, like, dead serious, ‘That was six minutes,’.”
Stunned belief.
“It was like, I’d have a contraction, then another one in twenty minutes. Then ten. Then ten. Then six. Then six. Then two. Two. Two. Then … forty minutes. And then it’d start that all over again.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Twenty-two hours. My doctor called it ‘prolonged latent phase.’ In the weeks after, when I’d be at the grocery store or whatever, and women would come up and be like, ‘Oh, look at the baby,’ and ask me when he was born, I’d say, ‘August eleventh … And twelfth,’.”
“Ha. Man, I can’t believe they didn’t cut you open.”
“My doctor was an OB, you know, homeopath. Holistic whatnot and all that. And he and I agreed. Ahead. Only life or death.”
“Ahh. Yeah.”
“Anyway, so, you know how, after, you just forget all the pain? Like it never existed? Like, you can remember, like, you can remember the moment when, like, for me, sixteen hours in, that if someone had come to me then, I’d lost my mind by then, if somebody had come to me then and said, ‘We can make the pain end, but we have to cut off your head,’ how you’d be like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ And they’d say, ‘But, if we do that, you’ll die. So … are you sure?’ and you’d be like, ‘Yes! Do it!’.”
Snicker.
“So, you know, you remember thinking something like that, or being that bad off, but after, you know, how the actual memory of it, as soon as you see the baby, the actual memory, it just all goes away?”
“Yeah. I remember that.”
“It was like that. Poof. The fear, and the suffering, was gone. Once I gave up the struggle. So, try to remember that, when you die. Just give up the struggle.”
“Got it.”
They softly chuckle.
“Then, anyway, I started to feel like I was floating, suddenly, like in the movie, Contact. When that chair the engineers put in there came loose. You see that one?”
“No.”
“Well, the dumbass engineers on Earth added this chair with seatbelts and such into the plan for the time travel machine, or, not that, but whatever it was, the space travel thing, but anyway, there was all of this violent shaking and I mean, violent, in the scene in the movie, I mean, not when I died, the shaking, when the ship took off or whatever, because that wasn’t in the plans, you know? And then when it broke loose, the chair, when the chair broke loose, then everything was all peaceful. It was just floating around, peaceful, and Jodie Foster was just floating, peaceful. All the noise and shaking and shuddering stopped. It was like that.”
“Peaceful.”
“Yeah. Immediate. And then I realized, or, it came into my awareness, this bitter cold. Like, way below zero. But it was the weirdest thing. I wasn’t uncomfortable. Like, I knew, like, I knew I should be cold, I knew I should be, you know, uncomfortable, but I kinda realized, I was just my essence. With no body. But who I am. All the way through. Same snarky bitch.”
Sharp guffaw.
“Seriously. It’s not like I turned into some kind of angel.”
“Aww. I think you’re an angel.”
Eye roll reply.
“Yeah, right. So, anyway, I just accepted it, because the cold didn’t bother me. I mean, I had no skin, so, once I let go of the thought of how I should feel about cold, it didn’t bother me. I just had to let go of how I thought I should feel about it.”
“Wow. That’s … yeah. That makes sense. I think.”
“Right. Like, there’s no fear associated with it, like of freezing to death. Or annoyance. You have no body. But anyway, I couldn’t really feel anything, like how we can feel things. I mean, I couldn’t feel my skin, but not like I was numb. I couldn’t feel anything, physically. Nothing. No physical sensations. So, it’s actually impossible for me to describe it, because I knew it was cold, but I couldn’t feel it, like how we can feel things, so I don’t know how to … to … but then I kind of sensed; this is not earthly. You know? Then I was thinking, I don’t know, like, curious, like, what’s this?”
“But you weren’t afraid?”
“Not once I gave up struggle. Once I gave up struggle, it felt great. And once I realized I had no body, it was even better. You would think that you would miss your body. But I didn’t. I was totally there, my whole being, who I am, and I didn’t need my body. It was freeing. So weird. You wouldn’t think it would be like that. But that’s how I felt. Free.”
“Free’s good. I like free.”
They pause, thinking.
“Then there was this flood of feeling. Like relief times ten. Or something. It was better than anything I can really describe.”
“Love. You said love before.”
“Well, that’s what I’ve said. It’s the closest word to it, but way more than the word we use here.”
“The word we use here. Funny. You were, what do you think, floating in the universe?”
“No. There weren’t any stars or anything. It’s really impossible to describe.” She squirmed a little. “It wasn’t here anywhere. I can’t explain it.”
“Yes, you can. Go on. Tell me.”
“I don’t know. Another dimension? Wow. That’s big. Ha.”
They looked at each other with demonstrably raised eyebrows. Smiled.
“But anyway, then I was floating and I was remembering people. I could picture their faces. And, the one that shocked me was this woman.”
“From the grocery line!”
“Yeah. The woman in the grocery line. That had happened years earlier. I had forgotten about her. Just a stranger in line. But there she was.”
“She was kind to you. At the store.”
“Yeah. I was scrounging up change, and counting it out, because I was so broke, and the cashier got indignant, rolled her eyes. And I looked back at her, the woman in line, embarrassed.”
“And she smiled at you.”
“Yeah. But the way she smiled. It was so genuine.”
“And then you heard the voice.”
“Yeah. But.”
“You didn’t hear it. You had no ears.”
“Right. It was, like, in my head.”
“But you didn’t have a head.”
“Right. But. I don’t know how else, anyway, it was like a thought, but not my thought. Not from inside my head. It was like, an implanted thought. It was someone else. I knew it was someone else. It wasn’t my thought, but it came to me like a thought, but more powerful. And clear. Like someone talking to me. I don’t know. I’ve thought about this, to try to describe it better, but the feeling was like …”
“Was it God?”
“No. Definitely not God. I don’t know, it was like, it seemed like, a guide of some sort.” She shifted in her seat. “That sounds corny.”
“No, it doesn’t. I don’t think it sounds corny.”
“That’s the closest I can get.”
“What did it say, or convey, or whatever. Implant.”
“It said, nothing bad you did ever mattered.”
“That’s good news.”
“And I have never been so utterly convinced that something was true. It took a second to digest it. But … it just felt … so … true. And once I fully accepted that, I mean, fully, fully knew that it was true, and accepted that, and leaned back into that, and relaxed, and things settled, it said, nothing good you did ever mattered.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. It was like, wow.”
“Cool. Like, no one’s keeping score.”
“Yeah, but even better. It’s like, it’s not like, you know, well, you did this bad stuff over here, but over here you did this good stuff, so that offsets it. More. Deeper. More like, it’s good to do good stuff, sure, that’s nice and all, but it just doesn’t matter. That’s just here,” she indicated with her hands, palms down, mildly bouncing, “in this world. And, really, think about it, like, the inauthenticity of, like, if you do good things, and then you think, see, I do good things, so I’m a good person, here’s the evidence, that’s like, if you’re doing good just to rack up some points, even if it’s, like, subconscious, or like, socialized, you know? That’s not authentic, really. That doesn’t hold water.”
“Yeah. True. True.”
“But the feeling, I can’t explain it, but it was even more than that. Like, it’s like, there aren’t good things. And there aren’t bad things. Not like how we think of it. But even better. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Hmmm.”
“Oh! I know. Total acceptance. I mean total, complete, no bullshit acceptance. Like, pure. No judgement. And then, and that’s when I started moving, as soon as I got that. It was a G-force. But I couldn’t feel it in my body, ‘cause, I had no body. Like, there was no wind, sound. Nothing. But I felt it anyway. Somehow.”
“Where were you going?”
“No idea.” She laughed out loud. “No earthly idea.”
“Ha!”
“It was just getting better and better and I loved it. Total acceptance. A deep realization. All my frustrations and resentments and worries had been a waste of energy. It almost struck me as funny. Like, I kinda felt like laughing. And then, suddenly, I was moving so fast, faster than anything I’ve ever experienced. Into something. A sense. A feeling. This enveloping sense of support. That I was utterly loved and supported by everything. Every thing. Everything. All around me. In me. Everywhere. Love.”
“Nice. Then?”
“Then I remembered Corey.”
“Your German Shepard.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen pictures. Chasing seagulls on the beach? He was beautiful.”
“Yeah. He was a good dog.”
“You hitchhiked with him, right? To California? Way back when?”
“Yeah. When I was nineteen.”
“Jeez. Crazy. So. Then?”
“Then, everything stopped. Full stop.”
“Aww.”
“Yeah.”
“Then?”
“Then the voice said, well, not said.”
“I know. Implanted.”
“Yeah. It implanted; do you want to go back?”
“And you went back?”
“No. I mean, I took a second to think about it. I was torn. I mean, damn, it felt so good. I didn’t want to go back. But then I saw his face, Corey’s, and I was like, shit, I should go back. ‘Cause I was thinking, who would take care of him? And then I thought, yeah. And the second, and I mean the very exact second, millisecond, that I had the thought … I was back.”
“Damn.”
“I sat up on the gurney and took this huge breath and then just passed out again.”
“The doctor told you that?”
“No. I mean, yeah. He confirmed it. When I talked to him about it the next day, he confirmed it. He said I was dead for a minute and seventeen seconds. Well, he didn’t say, ‘dead,’ of course. He said that my heart stopped and I stopped breathing. And they didn’t do anything to bring me back, because, well, they didn’t think I would be able to survive the brain injury. But yeah, he confirmed that I sat up and took in this big breath.”
Pause.
“I’m glad you remembered that dog.”
She looked down, sheepish.
“That dog went missing six months after that. Someone stole him, I guess.”
“Well,” sweetly, “I’m glad he didn’t go missing six months before that.”
Another pause.
“But, so, you don’t have to worry about the dolphins, right?”
“I guess not.”
“They’ll be okay. Either way.”
“Once they give up the struggle.”
“Yes. Once they give up the struggle.”
Originally published by Amethyst Review as “The Cat.”
Photo credit: Pixabay.
The Life You Could Have: a memoir 