by Aumaine Rose Gruich

San Francisco, California

Cardboard boxes of bok choy / stacked high behind the restaurant
where bus exhaust and smoke compete with fog / soak in rain and release
insistent tendrils that soon will mold / That emerald hue comes up hours later
in dizzy crouch against grafittied bathroom walls / sticky hands on porcelain
and the bite of lime / This youth of mine a ruckus / of carried aways—
Yet somewhere atop the city / the Sutro Baths clatter their colors and woo
O to be imaged anew / I’d shed this snakeskin shift dress / don instead the otherdust
of seaside / tide back what’s been carried away / but which of its tones to choose—

moss, sage, or that light-
struck unmentionable grey
best described as bone

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Aumaine Rose Gruich is the Assistant Managing Editor of Ninth Letter. She has received support from the Chautauqua Writer’s Workshop and the Illinois Department of Dance’s Choreographic Platform. Her poems have been finalists in Ruminate Magazine’s Janet B. McCabe and Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer poetry contests. Other work is published or forthcoming in magazines such as AGNI, Pleiades, Court Green, Phoebe, and Hobart.