Dictaphone 6, Johnson Ave., San Luis Obispo

The hills were not brown,

or were they this brown and I just didn’t see?

Everybody put on a mask

and ask like it’s not summer.

Naked ladies blooming

everywhere in clusters.

It’s unseemly the way you speak,

with the top down on a back road.

Can’t you hear my turn signal?

I think all day in lazy spirals,

I think: ambulance, how to keep time if not a watch,

how when I elevate you that makes me feel finalized,

dryer than

the hills,

the tinderbox pills,

what we yield to each other in a cluster,

how tone is lost,

how do light is yellow,

how you,

how are you.