Top Twenty Places to Start a Family


You’ve made me backward because the city is too stretched, thin as day, and I am a flume, a fluke, a flounder.

You fire-grilled quail & liver, you endive & lamb’s lettuce, you Speckel pear & Serrano, you the soft poached egg atop my crouton raft.

We sped off through the browned grass of the San Joaquin to find the registration key, we located the ice machine on the sixth floor, we kissed against the basement doorjamb.

We were Bakersfielded to the marina, testing software, feeding gulls, asking questions about John Green, we were the brown glass bottles to someone else’s lips.

We were writing answers for the standardized test, turning clouds to smoke, trekking through the tenderloin, searching for a hazelnut. (You are not a sheriff.)

We are a glass pipe and ugly in the finest way, we are desperate housewives and a starched white shirt.

We fell together off the bridge that leads to the white sand beach, we couldn’t find Sara, we got lost amidst the rocks and lichens.

We slept together off the plaid comforter, off the 3 am, off the Tao of your back, your children’s pants.

O old hotel O Bing Crosby Xmas waif, I see you at the SFMOMA, hugging a Jasper Johns.

We were splotches of paint. We were a postcard from one coast to the other.

In the bottom of our favorite wedding photo your tiny hand’s against a stump, a mural, a fragrant redwood, my best Diego Rivera.

You are not the Burnside Bridge, or the Hawthorne. Not the Coit Tower, not Union Square.

I am not Bob Kaufman, not Rich Molnar, not a flinger of twenty-sided dice, not a wearer of skirts, not a kisser of boys (at least not often), not a folk singer.

You are not Patsy Cline. Not a supermodel. Not a Mason jar, not a fragile poet. Not a Claire Huxtable, not a schoolmarm. Certainly not Emily Dickinson.

We are an infant system, a blinking sign that reads “Cocktails,” another boring list poem.

You are the stone in my left hand and softly snoring on the left side of my bed, a ring in the side of your nose.