JOHN DAVIS

DATE WITH CALIFORNIA DESIRE

Ravish me into extinction with your wicked lips
is the pick-up line I’m waiting to hear
in this city of dark fire. Rocks walk on water here

and disappear like questions I never answered.
When the world shifts position, a rift of light
breaks on the walkers waiting at the stoplight.

One of them is walking to me, an archive of flesh.
Her ancestors harbored pirates. Their gods
wore necklaces pale as shells, and praised the belief

of greed. She is walking to my bristled beard
stepping on cracks that broke the backs of Latinos
pouring cement. They could almost see their world

from the window of the van racing across the border.
She is walking as if she has risen from the ash
of volcanos. Her hair is smooth as the underbelly

of a possum. She wanders like the sentences
of a lecturer fascinated with his own rhetoric.
She’s here, almost here, like a country on the verge

of independence from itself shouting poems
of exorcism as if they are the elbows that grind
knots in our collective muscles.

John Davis is the author of Gigs, Guard the Dead and The Reservist. His work has appeared in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Terrain.org. He lives on an island in the Salish Sea. and performs in several bands.