Poems by Elizeya Quate

What’s Real Is Feeling Opposite

None of
this is real.
I am
a bus station.
You are
a pair of
enormous
sunglasses.
I am
a motel lobby.
You are
a road
sign war-
ning of
mudslides.
I am
a steering
wheel.
You are
a crackly
Bible’s
radio station.
I am
an empty
intersection.
You are
the horizon
of I-80, flush
-ing scar-
let with
a sudden
dawn.

Obvious Concealments

Sometimes
I want to
conceal
that sweet
lemon
glimpse of
last sum-
mer’s moon
inside this
poem.

That’s
not what
I’m try-
ing to
do here,
though.
At least
I’m not
trying
very hard.

Obvious
conceal-
ments
aren’t
really
conceal-
ments, I
think, be-
cause they
only
draw at-
tention
to what
one’s not
supposed
to wish
was there.

 

Elizeya Quate lives in the Bay Area and his first book came out this summer from Kernpunkt Press