Tremors

There was another earthquake.
Usually, I sleep through them,
undisturbed by the insistence
of the earth beneath my body
and the bed. This time, though,
the jolt was enough to wake me.
To make the dog stand up like
there was something he should
be hunting. I fell back to sleep
easily, like I tend to, thinking
how the crack in the living room
wall would etch deeper. Thinking
how everyone else in LA was
grabbing their phone to tweet
“EARTHQUAKE!”
so I didn’t have to.

We are overdue for the big one.
Something the landscape and I
have in common. The one that will
come at us like Robert DeNiro
in Taxi Driver, but in Beverly Hills
instead of Manhattan, wiping all
the scum and goodness out, ripping
your McMansion from its foundation.
In my mind, I see the palms burning,
clichés flaming, pom-poms in the slender
long arms of cheerleaders, but
I’m not sure how they’d catch fire,
only that they should. I think of asking
a psychic about the image next time
one stops me. I am always being
stopped by them. They slip me cards
printed with ancient looking symbols,
tell me something in my eyes spoke
to them across the gas station display of
gum or condoms.

Once I had my tarot cards read.
I approached it like a cross-examination.
Are you in love? she asked and I sat back,
wondering why she wouldn’t just tell me,
then debating whether I was, now that
someone had asked me plainly. Anyway,
I put their cards in my pocket, and then
when I get home, the trash under the
kitchen sink. It’s a bad omen, I’m sure.
But I don’t want the future until I’m
in the future, and even then,
maybe I won’t.

For now I will sleep through
the small quakes, wait for the
real destruction.

Lindsay Miller lives and works in LA. By day, she's a journalist and editor. She's at work on her first novel, and her fiction and poetry has been published in Black Heart Magazine, Cleaver, Literary Orphans, Rogue Agent, Angel City Review, to name a few.