Morning in Monterey

Only knowing the mountains because they’re darker
than the sky, racing the night on the 5,
the sun rising from the east, while truckers rest
atop hills, above the headlight river—
the reflection of taillights, the narrowing road—
beauty in a soft curve, the earth getting lighter
as it grows up, having spent yesterday wracked
when all I had to do was stand and claim the night.
After rain, the flood drifts me further north.
The low fog makes a mesa of the mountains,
while the sun doesn’t so much rise
as cover each color in a new skin.
A cloud of blackbirds shifts beneath the mist,
before the sea, before I called morning “morning.”

Saturn Waning 

In the evening, the juniper jumped into bushes,
forming a horizon line that rolled like clouds,
darkness meeting the navy of the sky.
At the top of the great fish bowl, two stars drift—
closer, closer, even as the town jumps into britches.
I sit on cracked ground off a road paved
with its own dust. She asks me what I’m doing
from another state, from the comfort of home.
I’m constantly travelling, yet I know when she’s awake,
finding no one else to follow but me, her hair streaks
the night sky, wanting more diamonds than this,
wanting more descendants than this, wanting
and knowing—stopped asking for more than this.
The voices in the skulls remain silent tonight,
their eyes forever casting down from the willows.
I am everything they ever wanted, standing up
with my feet readied for rain. There, deep
in my nursing heart, a tucked memory—
music drifting from my old cassette stereo,
music meant to make me fall asleep,
music that stays with me in the darkness
as my dreams flash like a sputtering projector
across my eyelids, until the many in the night sky
speak closer into the expanse of time.

Alex Stanley is a graduate of Boston College, and he received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine.