El Camino Real

PUBLISHED: July 13, 2015

The corridor, a New Jersey of the West, its stucco newness.
What king was it that built this highway?

The jornaleros with dusty bucket hats
wait for hire beneath the on-ramps

and blocks fill with retirees from somewhere colder.
Lava gardens now outwait the sun. Chapped garages

are stocked against the sure disaster—
the man a few blocks over with his lettuces,

Southern voice & melanomic skin
saw me walking with my infant son:

He said, hey neighbor, keep in mind
I have a shotgun. You can take my lemons if I offer:

But steal em: bam—I’ll show who’s boss.

Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Last West and Rift Zone, both from Red Hen. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, the Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies. She was a Fulbright scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has served as the poetry critic for All Things Considered for over a decade. She teaches poetry and nonfiction at the University of California, Davis.

Published: July 13, 2015

Updated: July 13, 2015

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