From FROM CALIFORNIA, ON by Jennifer Denrow...



In California, I look like me but with a better person inside.

I scratch myself. I scratch I’m here into me.

I thought it would be like everyone else to be here. They are. They’re meaning it. I mean to be with them. From each other, the light settles us. My eyes are kept open at the ocean and the salt comes. I pick out my own sticks. No one has had enough.

Because of the most time, because of the others, we see everything before us as itself and formally as a possibility.

This must be the water then, the animals from it.

I’m going apart.

I’m going to parts.


***


Since I’m in California, I see a seal in the ocean come and go like a children’s game. I test myself against it by predicting where it will reappear. I’m wrong. The tide slows. Sometimes, at night, I can’t imagine anything else. This is the kind of loneliness we didn’t mean: being so small next to a place that can’t imagine us. We are not likely. I tell the ocean how it’s improbable water. I write it all down in the sand. Before, when I only wanted to come here, I was someone who was possible. I thought of everything then. And kept rearranging it to be something different.

When the ocean touches the dog, he is surprised and jumps back.







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