Jessica Breheny


Incidentals

Shadows form trees on the median.
Browning ropes of ivy tendril the sound barrier into a crocheted crumble of lace. A kind of love
you’ve never noticed before: The freeway is built through ghosts of forests,
through landscapes under landscapes …

A development’s exhausted windows glint at cars the impossible colors of toys.

In the yard, it weathers.
Spiders build. Seed pods fall. A small grave settles.
These are incidental beauties.

A machine cries from behind a neighbor’s walls.
You want to hold it, you want to say,
I’m sorry.


Jessica Breheny lives in Santa Cruz, California and teaches writing at San Jose City College. She is the fiction editor for Ping Pong, the literary arts journal of the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California. Her work has appeared in Avery, Eleven Eleven, elimae, Fugue, LIT, Other Voices, and Santa Monica Review, among other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Some Mythology (Naissance Press).
 
 
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