Today's poem is by Jasmine Khaliq

Brentwood, April 3rd
        what is this, pulling me back the other way
        to strip malls, highways, and treetops?
                —Caroline Polachek, "Parachute"

for my twenty-fifth birthday I'd like to skydive
off Vasco road they take people up
my dad did this once before I was
ever born; the hill opened up
his right knee. my mom watched, pregnant with me,
still unnamed, unsexed, surely the size of recognizable fruit,
surely recognizable fruit, every possibility. I'll never
do that again, he says, but I haven't gone, I want to go
skydiving; I think I would jump; I want to know california that way,
unnaturally; I want to rattle like shucked corn inside myself;
I want to see what my dad must have seen—after this,
he bought a house in the county; he bought my sister and I a childhood
drawing on our wrists with sap from gerbera daisies,
or that's what I remember—I want to see all of it, at once—
the last two decades, mount diablo, a movie theater, new lots, new lawns
two golf clubs on the other side of town—I went to school
there my dad bought me a childhood here my sister and I,
but he never took us cherry picking. every spring
I fell in love with people who could never understand me,
and they're reappearing in my dreams.
I'm still in love; we're at any one of our old houses.
I used to drive to get you. dark blue chrysler with no a/c
in the worst of our summers.
those roads to your house I drive in my sleep.
o'hara, fairview, minnesota, lone tree. I liked to watch
you drive me, I still would, your jaw.
what was that alchemy? only proximity?
to write sometimes I put on lipstick, jewelry, vivaldi.
today: slow-motion videos of parachutes deploying:
birds of paradise above us, color by color peeling. I want it—
east bay rushing up toward me, unnaturally; roads
I took; tense walks along deer creek. I wanted to disappear
here so many times. barely april and it's hot enough to change
how the air smells—more animal,
more alive. would you have imagined me
making it to twenty-five? smaller in the sky than any recognizable fruit,
poppy blooming overhead, able finally to see        these strip malls,
highways, our childhoods, endless, green,
every line—parallel, intersecting.

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Copyright © 2022 Jasmine Khaliq All rights reserved
from Rattle
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission