Three poems from Mouth & Fruit

La Jolla Boys

• We sit here on the pier and think
• That, someday, we will drink.
• We tip our Pepsi toward the sun
• It’s vintage 1981.
• Still too young for real fun
• And rich La Jolla Boys.

• Me and Jenny planning through
• Our string bikini beach debut
• But haven’t got a thing to flaunt
• Against this sea of debutantes
• Their fishing lines already taut
• With rich La Jolla Boys.

• As strong as Crystal Pier is long
• And eyes Pacific blue,
• We’ve waited more than fifteen years
• To meet men just like you.
• We practice doing runway walks
• And suck on popsicles like cocks
• And build sand castles as we talk
• Of rich La Jolla Boys.

Cocktails

• I sit on your patio, alone,
• my empty glass as heavy as a gun,
• my satin straps and clasps not yet undone.

• Each guest shines with candlelight and wine
• poised before the window, drink in hand,
• balanced on your perfect baritone.

• This empty glass is just a timing gun:
• a heavy heart, all steel and no shot,

• that announces the anticipated start,
• says it’s time, at last, to run,

• and takes the blame for blasting it apart.

Descanso, California

• The rich, black humus, airborne, glimmers gold,
• gray granite boulders softly wrapped in moss
• beneath the dusty light of oaks as old
• as California.

• Creeks just right to cross
• with one wide leap and lined with cottonwood,
• river stone chimneys, an abandoned bridge
• which finally lost its lumber in the flood.

• Manzanitas, red beneath the ridge,
• the muted clop of horses down the street
• melts the whispering rasp of raking leaves
• filtered slowly through the mountain heat
• beneath the stellar blue of make-believes:

• The slumber of Descanso’s summer spell
• wrapped in a heritage of chaparral.

Chryss Yost, a San Diego native, graduated from University City High three decades ago. She served as Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate from 2013–2015. She has edited several anthologies and is the founding editor of the Shoreline Voices Project from Gunpowder Press. Mouth & Fruit is her first full-length collection of poems.