A line of palm trees standing demure before the great purple face of the city’s eponymous mountains god-gifted with resort quality snow.
Behind the trees, glinting and sprawling like the many mansions of God are the warehouses of Stater Bros. markets, their trucks lining the city’s eponymous avenue ready to serve it first, before serving the rest of the southern half of the state.
Industry portrait of one local boy done good— chamber picture of the wished-for city.
I am an essayist and poet. My work has been rejected by some of the finest journals in America. Fortunately, it also gets accepted from time to time and has appeared in equally fine journals such as Word Riot, Inlandia, Brew City Magazine, and SageWoman, among others.. In 2002, I won the Academy of American Poets Prize for Vanderbilt University.
For no good reason, I possess an unnecessarily dark humor which is why being third generation California Inland Empirian delights me so. My gods are weird. I once won $350 for writing a smartassed essay on “why the wise use of water is important in my daily life”. I am undoubtedly the Greek god Hermes’ special snowflake. I’m pretty sure I got into college via a series of fortuitous clerical errors.
When I had to grow up and get a real job, I decided against it and stayed a writer. I have worked many odd—and I mean odd—jobs to support my habit: PR writer for country music hopefuls, resume massager, WalMart fitting room attendant and switchboard operator, and telephone psychic, just to name a few.
I am also albino. That's why my psychic gifts are so strong. I traded in my pigment for magical foresight, because that's how it works. It gets all technical. Trust me. That's totally how it works.
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2 thoughts on “San Bernardino Postcard (poetry)”
Reading palms is difficult. The Horatio Alger spirit has struggled through the heroes of the Great Depression, World War 2, and the post-war boom and optimism. In iconic history the many gold rushes have had their mountains, their mole hills grown large, and yet many are left behind in purple prose’s majesty, supermarkets, supermen, comic heroes, and tragic comedy that leaves behind a forgotten wasteland of failed social experiments. Somewhere crumbs are still collected, and thrown to the birds who can still fly away if the winds would not be too hot for a day and the rain for floods would stay away lurking in the eponymous mountains like the wrath that waits for no one.
M. N. Ashley 
Reading palms is difficult. The Horatio Alger spirit has struggled through the heroes of the Great Depression, World War 2, and the post-war boom and optimism. In iconic history the many gold rushes have had their mountains, their mole hills grown large, and yet many are left behind in purple prose’s majesty, supermarkets, supermen, comic heroes, and tragic comedy that leaves behind a forgotten wasteland of failed social experiments. Somewhere crumbs are still collected, and thrown to the birds who can still fly away if the winds would not be too hot for a day and the rain for floods would stay away lurking in the eponymous mountains like the wrath that waits for no one.
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Purple prose is pretty damn majestic, I give you that, but I’m fairly positive wrath waits for everyone. Polite fellow, that wrath.
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