By Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad
I have filled my phone with hundreds of sunsets,
live and burst and unfiltered horizons, products
of impulsive tapping and urgent recapturing,
chromatic snapshots I have never revisited, not once
did I scroll back for the umbrella pines
silhouetted by scarlet aflame, or
the ocean’s pink and fiery ribbon shimmering
to the palms of the quartz sand shore, because
ultimately, every sunset is the same—even
when fronds curve into strips of fuchsia and indigo,
even when pelicans swoop behind mangroves
painted with the heat of tangerine, even when spruce
grazes cumulus clouds bleeding magenta and honey
diagonally, even when the halved glow aligns
with red maples and the grid of concrete,
even when cacti crowns and jagged peaks
shadow a melting twilight, even when slipping rays
gild a winding procession of resolute cypress—
every sunset is the same: a dripping rainbow
doomed, color explosion until there is none,
a soft, slow, violent collapse of light,
I should have swelled my storage with gingkoes,
odorous matrons with their butterfly wing leaves,
so vigorously yellow, so canary so lemon,
on that abruptly cold evening by the food truck,
I watched how a row of them turned all that dark,
brightening the abandoned sky without
the help of a single lamppost or centered star
Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad is a poet and attorney. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and New England Review among others. She won the 2019 LUMINA La Lengua contest and the 2016 Pinch Literary Prize, and is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. Her work can be found at www.mt-poet.com.
