At the Checkout

At the Checkout
Originally uploaded by smartsetpix.

80 Carolina parking lot, around five o’clock, cool and cloudy skies. My cousin Andrea walks from her car and into the building to work. “I didn’t know you’d work this late,” I said. Our desks were supermarket check-out stands. Our computers were where the cash register should’ve been. K. A. demonstrated how this new set-up was going to work.

Monday Morning, Riding The Bus

The page of the book I’m reading (Geraldine Kim: Povel) glows in a fragment of peach-light. I’m on a comfortable and smooth-riding bus and it’s seven-thirty in the morning. The top half and tips of the Port of Oakland crate movers are covered in thick and gray fog. Greens and Reds, coming mostly from the logos of metal shipping boxes and stop signs, are vibrant and alive. when I decide to stop reading a paragraph and look out the window I see that sunlight finds the cracks and crevices in the clouds. Ships and barges from this distance look like model toys. The sun’s light glows ominous. Itself is reflected in the bay’s water as if it were an omen, the approach of a boiling comet that’s specifically reaching for San Francisco; a city asleep in its own gray doldrums.