Corona Heights

Abstract

Corona Heights Kate Wisel (bio) If I were what I see, these logs, I'd be a staircaseand this view. Long, rambling geometry I tracebut can't learn. Feet gripping bedrock. Californiastreet signs: Van Ness, Bella Vista, Divisadero,high-grade shampoos I want but can't afford.Nob Hill tennis balls spin over net then roll like pbr cans in the Haight. I am crushedas a can sliced into weapon, lostas your mind when you sent meto the grass outside the Auto Bodyshop as men wiped their handsclean of oil. Your arms like a wheel turningthe air from my throat. There is concrete where I want to speak. The wall the junkierests her head on. Mouth agapewith smoke, I count the knots that climbher throat and narrow stairs between rowsof queenly houses. The trim that ties them,the way you did before you leaned over melike an emt and cut off my clothes,knifed the net of my nylons. In San Franciscostairs double forward, steep as the day I met you. Trees dangle broomsticksI reach but can't grasp. At the bridge,fog erases the road and the suspension's [End Page 51] raise arms like the crowd that stole youthrough palms at the metal show. I watchedyou go, your anger lifted at last by handsthat shared the weight, all your tattoosblinking to life like amulets for the passage. Cables pull the busesgodward. And there, the sun with its warmfingers flashing relentlessly at my throat.I'd do anything to climb inside its mouth. [End Page 52] Kate Wisel Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men (University of Pittsburgh Press 2019) winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House online, Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, The Best Small Fictions 2019, Norton Anthology: Flash Fiction America, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the "Poetry on the T" prize and the Marcia Keach Prize. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and awarded scholarships at The Wesleyan Writer's Conference, the Squaw Valley Writer's Workshop, the Juniper Institute, Writing x Writer's at Tomales Bay and Methow Valley and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press