ISSUE 5
Christian Paulisich
Point Reyes Pastoral
Face it: the Golden Gate
was never gold but international
orange, red with rust. The summer
my parents announced their split,
we drove through heavy cables
hung like rosaries,
due north toward the gull-white
lighthouse, out-of-service,
past the pastures where we picnicked.
Pacific whitecaps popped
up closer to gravel shores.
I braced the windbreaker
tight to my chest
in morning’s gnaw. No one spoke
of her, elastic hair ties
knotted in his truck bed,
those business trips.
Milk thistle sprouts, magenta bombs
peppered sparse green landscape. Mares
buried faces into troughs.
By evening, the car was dead
quiet; we looked to the bridge,
consumed in a nuclear blaze.
Christian Paulisich received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has been published in or is forthcoming from Literary Matters, Denver Quarterly, Atlanta Review, New American Writing, Little Patuxent Review, Hunger Mountain, Doubly Mad and others. He is a poetry reader for The Hopkins Review.