California, Early Fall

We always found better reasons 
not to do what we were supposed to. 

Instead, N would drive 80 into 49 until even the dead 
ends couldn’t stop us. Down a river, any river, just to get naked in 

the forest, haul the skin through the dry romp of soil, like tea spices 
from a stolen land. Muted earth that must’ve housed an entire lake bed once. 

Back then, it seemed wrong to worry about wasting 
away when the world was calling out our name 

while blowing on charcoal ash. I saw a comedian once say 
every day, 2 million acres, that’s too many acres and then he’d drive around— 

answer emails, get hungry, forget, laugh. I too have forgotten what fire 
feels like inside the mouth and anything else is hearsay. 

He is right—there is so much distance. The smell of burning bark only 
barely fogs up the bay window, just as the real fog is said to recede 

in the New York Times, a tragedy, and N speaks of moving 
for her Masters in Museum Studies then caveats, changing lanes, 

how fucked even the museums are, I did not know 
that anything can be a detour, map the archive of distorted pasts, even the heart 

just needs to get away sometimes. So we drive and drive 
until light curls into the wheels alongside and only the flicker 

of an industrial plant on the 5 looks like it could be an entire city 
run by artifacts of us, fixing a pipe and knocking glass into wood 

until it is no longer as permanent. We are anything but idle, constantly leaving 
for what we came here to do. N will be gone tomorrow and I too have some place 

to digress, imagine an answer. And when I learn that they put out a wildfire by igniting 
another to propagate towards it, such that they meet and quell each other’s flame, it seems 

too obvious, almost reasonable, that there is no alternative to what desire 
demands on the way; to how we clasped our hands tight over the gear shift. 

ELIZABETH RUTH SHEHTER

Elizabeth Ruth Shehter writes poetry and studies cloud physics, which are often in conversation with one another in her work. Her writing has been published in WRITE-HAUS, where, after winning their Outstanding Poetry Prize, she became the magazine’s Poetry Editor.