How small the rains that feed that city,
that settle its dust and high flat glare: city leaning
back in its chair against the Coastal Ranges,
city paved smooth and level to the concrete drain,
the channelized river. So little of it and so confined.
I went past every morning and also believed
there was One Way to manage land and water,
to follow its inscriptions, downhill,
Mountains-to-Sea—
                             where river strokes
the esophageal hollow, memory sinks
a pale thread of root: the yellow streetlight, blooming.
Wet hedge square-clipped in the breath mint sky,
curb licked clean, draining the trapezoidal valley
of sun-flat cement. Body’s width of water
meek in the light. One unruly patch, cloud of sun flies,
frilled inches of algae, dead rabbit, ducklings
stepping around it in their slow march
to Newport Beach—
                             Now I am the duck,
remembering: the water as conveyor belt,
chorus line, arrow glittering with dew.
Now I am the rabbit and I’ve had enough:
water & no water, detritus, desire:
I will burst through the pores with one more
helping of life, I will spill over the lowest railing.
Could I have seen it then? If I had followed
the levee to its sand-foam mouth, worming
knee-deep out to shore, would I have caught its meaning,
would I have known who sat behind my eyes
and placed this image high on the shelf
of that hollow concrete year.

Jessica Yuan is author of the chapbook Threshold Amnesia (2020), winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. She has received fellowships from Kundiman and Miami Writer’s Institute, and her poems are published in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, jubilat, Boulevard, Ninth Letter, The Journal, and elsewhere. She holds a Masters in Architecture from Harvard and currently works as an architectural designer in Boston.