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  • Caravansary, and: California
  • Megan Harlan (bio)

Caravansary

The day is a landscape escapingfrom the earth. Every day I moved awayfrom you, past walls of closed doors,through colors charting the outskirts of a life.

Imagine all the doors cast open, all the otherstrangers. Travel is how love pretendsto change. A new room unlike forgiveness,unlike the soul. A scattering of uses

for escape. Every night the center changes,hunkers down. A chamber like the heart-with solid walls, transfusing starlight-fills in for here, this bed without you.

California

It breaks apart into chasms and dry heat.Freeways pierce the shore like detours to a holy site,limned by money, tar, the scented goldof grass and eucalyptus, cars and last resorts.

What is holier than a way to feel again,even if by money we mean a last resort, or by beautywe mean detour. Its inlands erupt with glaciers,gold and avocados like bones jutting through skin, [End Page 65]

and its skin is beauty felt as heat. Like canyon hawks,the freeways hover over subdivisions,and the mirror of the Pacific, gone cloudy and forgiving,fragments endlessly from within. [End Page 66]

Megan Harlan

Megan Harlan's poems are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, have been featured twice on Poetry Daily, and have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Phoebe, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Meridian, and Sycamore Review. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

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