FREIGHT & FABLES

by Michael Juliani

The sun strafes my grandmother’s 
rear-facing bedroom. It is July
but the house feels cool, 
designed by missionaries 
to hold the shade. She has read me 
this book enough times 
I should have it memorized—
the rabbit’s home 
an algae-scum pond, a stone 
eventually arched above 
its skull. I hear every word 
like a desperate phone call 
from a relative. I am five and dreaming 
of a San Francisco I never knew: 
fog shrouding my parents 
as they join hands in a park. 
My grandmother closes the book 
and asks if I hear a train 
approaching. I hear parrots 
flocking the eucalyptus 
and the crackling leaves 
of a sycamore burning 
in an oil drum. Tainted heat 
presses through the walls. 
No train is coming, not until 
the middle of the night, 
when a Union Pacific will bellow 
its first leg towards Salt Lake, 
where cold men will join it 
to a freighter. We sit 
on my grandmother’s bed, 
hot wind scraping around 
the cobwebbed edges of our house. 
Hours later, my mother’s car 
will appear at the top of the lane,
inching its way down, 
her face brightening 
once she knows I can see her. All 
the signs do nothing to quell 
the many things I know to be true.

Michael Juliani is a poet, editor, and writer from Pasadena, California. His poetry manuscript, The World Is Not Astonished, was named a finalist for the 2021 Jake Adam York Prize (Copper Nickel/Milkweed Editions). His articles, essays, interviews, poems, and stories have appeared in outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Epiphany, Guernica, Bennington Review, and the Washington Square Review. He lives in Los Angeles.