Jeffrey Schultz

After Ernesto Trejo And the morning’s marine layer cloud cover’s   just beginning to unhinge, to let the buttery light of another daybreak slip through And weigh down the dead lawns and sagging rooftops of  this neighborhood, where Cold War era television antennas Still cast shadows like B-52s heading offshore, where poverty, this early is the smell of  Malt-O-Meal and the dregs of  thin beer Washed down the sink. Where the shift begins at 7AM, but consciousness has a way of coming round as slowly As this old computer monitor flickers its dull sixteen colors into being. On it, the names and numbers of  laundromat and liquor store owners, Fast food managers and lawn care companies; it’s my job to cold call them, read from a script on the benefits of membership In the Executive Dining Club, not take No for an answer. I’m no good and both the boss and I know it, and he’s hovering When the scraped-out voice of  the woman on my phone answers me with My husband’s been killed, and then, instead of  hanging up, Throws the receiver down next to something — dishwasher or window AC, I don’t know — but something close, it sounds, to tearing itself  apart, Something cycling through an awful, screeching noise. And it’s because I’ve paused that the boss flings a pencil Into the wall in front of  me and edges closer, and because of  the fear of  unemployment forms or the sky opening up if  I were to walk out, And because this sound — the un-oiled, flak-fouled crack of  it — has left me standing suddenly at the end of a runway, planes Screaming low overhead and loaded for the beginning of  the end of the world, that I start back into the script, start back as if  I believe each word, Even though, in the rattle and dust of  the jet-wash, no one hears a thing.

Griffith Park, Los Angeles Every living heart . . . all over this broad land, will yet swell . . . , when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. —Abraham Lincoln Because the body now and its organs suggest nothing but those pathologies in which we’ve been instructed, Because the gutter’s black as new blood, a Petri dish of piss and teeth knocked loose at the root, Because our walking here’s scared up pigeons and the air’s thick with their disease, because, therefore, we’re holding Our breath in silent prayer, Good People of Los Angeles, for our immune systems, for hand sanitizer, For swift and decisive return of the sun’s irradiating grace, I can hardly say I even know you much Beyond the turnstile’s slick in the discount supermarket, the sidewalk’s chewing gum and tuberculosis. But I’ve been thinking of you, of your eyes darting behind