May Gray—or June Gloom, or, if it lasts extremely long (as it did last year), No-Sky July—is one of the things I love most about living in Los Angeles. You know the barely bearable kiln-fired heat of the summer is coming, but somehow you are granted a kind of stay. This poem gathers up other snippets of life that hold that same kind of magic for me. For a more scientific explanation, here’s how the Twitter (X) account of the National Weather Service explains May Gray: “This time of year we often see low clouds/fog persist near the coasts due to high pressure, ocean winds, & temp differences between water & land. Coastal areas stay much cooler due to cloud cover.”
The clouds will fry away soon—it’s only a matter of time
before sunshine floods into every open hand and heat
becomes a religion. Brunch is over, but the glasses
haven’t been cleared and we’re still at the table talking.
We are between anticipation and dread, inverted
exclamation point and semicolon, the opening vocal line
in the reggaeton song and the drop of the first bass beat.
I am parceling out the last lump of butter
from the paper wrapping. The sprinter
is giving her quads a shake before stepping
into the blocks. At dinner, let’s order everything
on the menu I still remember how to say
in Mandarin. The gas needle is at E
and we are coasting. We might
make it all the way home.•
This poem appears in Issue 27 of Alta Journal.
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Jia-Rui Cook is a writer, editor, and producer based in Los Angeles. She won the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize in 2013 and later served as the editor of the nonprofit journalism and events organization. A former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, Cook works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she tells stories about Mars rovers, Saturn orbiters, and satellites studying Earth.
