Day Moon

By Edgar KunzJanuary 12, 2020

• LARB Lit

This piece appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Weather, No. 24 

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¤

DAY MOON

In the weeks after I left I waited

for someone a friend or her herself to walk

quickly up to me on the bus

or in the artisanal coffee shop and slap

my face spit on my hands call

me a bastard a real motherfucker by

weeks I mean the better part

of a year and by waited I mean I wanted

to be revealed by some visible sign

of my wretchedness a welt

to ride the ledge of my cheekbone

through the shit-spackled streets

of San Francisco a city ruined

by money and incomparably

beautiful it didn’t come and it didn’t

come and I grew desperate I stared

too long at strangers at Safeway I bought

boxes of clementines and ate them

like a possum on the train cramming

the rinds in the gap between the seat

and the wall I drank dark beer I made

no calls I sat on a hot metal bench

by a briny lake and tried

to imagine the lives of the joggers

passing in front of me their joys

their sicknesses and regrets it was

melodramatic I was useless I thought

of my friend who wrote a novel over

a long winter in Nova Scotia

read it once and buried it in the copse

of birches behind the house he chose

the spot he said for its plainness

so he couldn’t remember later

and dig it up and in this way one

medicated season slid into the next

without incident gardenia bloom

persistent sun I fell in love

with the perfect voice of a Midwest

radio DJ from a station I streamed

on my phone called in one request

after another I fell in love with a video

of Stevie Nicks singing backstage

to her makeup artist sheer

cotton dress their harmonies breezy

and immaculate I woke around noon

to the thup-thup of helicopters went out

in my underwear and found a fine

black powder settling on the windowsills

dusting the parked cars a day moon

suspended in orange haze it turned out

a man who would go months without

getting caught was methodically burning

the half-built condo complexes one

by one one in ten thousand residents

is a billionaire the same article

told me though I could be forgiven 

for thinking the headlands were on

fire again the intervals between

such disasters collapsing I caught

my neighbor’s eye who was stretching

on her stoop in a fantastic powder-blue

tracksuit what a world I said and she didn’t

seem to hear and jogged down the steps

and across the narrow street that stubborn

moon behind her rising or sinking  

or neither it was hard to know

¤

Edgar Kunz is the author of Tap Out (Mariner/HMH, 2019), a NYT New & Noteworthy book.