A pink house;
a child,
kneeling in the dirt.

Clods of mud
like lakes on maps

stuck to the road.

 

—
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her chapbook, Various Lies is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

If they are right
and the ocean fills the street
I’ll shut

the door
and watch

for herring
out the window. (Schools

of silver, chandeliers
of thinning

rain.)

The afterimage softly
bleeds out

into nothing,

light and line and melting
sun.

 

—
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Gnarled Oak, The Mas Tequila Review, Paper Nautilus, Word Riot, Hobart, and The Potomac Review, among others.

My shoes
still smell like lake water,
humped like buried

rocks
by the front door.

On the boat we’d call
them shoal, those drowning
rocks:

ragged teeth

jawing weakly
underwater.

Now the lake has all gone
dry: forgotten

summers heaped like shells
along its edge. Broken

sunglasses
and bottles. Plastic
knives like thin flat
bones.

I walk for hours
to find
the inlet where
we swam, staining our fingers

with new berries
while the clouds

dissolved above us
like spent rain.

 

—
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley. She spends much of her time staring at the sky, which is almost incessantly beautiful.