Scott Tucker


Grocery and Gifts

They figured they’d be farther along in life by now than two young skirts selling gasoline and cigarettes on Elger Bay. The problem wasn’t these men coming in to buy bait, they figured. Someone had to be the customers. Or us, opening at six.

They saw Katterman’s dog had gotten loose again along the highway and they watched it cross over to the other side.

It was more about luck, they figured.


A Poet on the Salvage Team

In these collapses, there is always one small object, it seems, thrown clear of the rubble farther than any other. Alvie couldn’t help thinking that must mean something to someone.

John Szabo

Big Green Moon In North Laguna


Dodging shiny tank-sized SUV’s
and their texting, latte-sipping,
GPS-distracted, cell-phone chatting
high on prescription drug driving,
foie gras arterie clogged
utterly miserable, corporate
pencil pushes and peons,
of which I was once one,
I maneuver across a highway of road kill,
through wooden skeletons
of track housing,
under rusted, barbed wire
that once kept back the cattle,
but now just cut through my jeans.

I continue through cool chaparral
foggy ravines with cottontails
frozen like statues,
black stink bugs,
vines with dried hollow gourds;
once drinking cups for Indians,
the bones of whom lay far beneath
this Pelican Hill Golf Resort,
too green and manicured,
from which fertilizers seep down,
eroding sand cliffs,
poisoning the tide pools below.

I breathe in deeply;
earth peppermint coolness,
salty sea mist,
and dance along the cliff,
arms spread wide like a
yellow-beaked, red-clawed hawk,
over a narrow, rocky beach
vast darkness of ocean
and beyond that;
a big green Laguna moon,
I can almost touch.