Michael Juliani
Summer 2025 | Poetry
West Adams
I eat my dinner in the dark,
none of that Delta blues playing
like on your vinyl. You laid down
on Jefferson Boulevard
by unfinished construction,
painters tape framing
all points of entry. One day
we would have lived in it,
stainless steel, your long-boned
coats in the closet. Halved again,
my crickets make a home
of untended grass. In the dewy gravel
I still sense you, covers kicked off,
your legs at three a.m. Maybe
I have a thing for tormented
women, but I don’t think of you
eating heavy dinners late
in bed, a cigarette in the rice.
The music I play at night
sings of long quarries
where teens fall in love.
I’m back at that half-built house,
both of us typing poems
that would leave each other
privately unimpressed.
The Buddhists, if they had
a concept of sin, would say
it’s the feeling when a hot,
dark room fades from its dream.
Michael Juliani is a poet, editor, and writer from Pasadena, California. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in outlets such as The Southern Review, Bennington Review, Washington Square Review, and Sixth Finch. He lives in Los Angeles.