Dale Going

It Was the Millennium. It Was Aught-Aught.

Once relevant, now quaint.
The makeshift ways which some people fancied essential.
If it didn’t come out of the refrigerator, it was a hot meal.
We all knew that California was full of notions.
Collage was what life was after college.
Which was everyone making their own case.
We felt like we had figured out the time thing.
Even in California you saw the dawn two hours before everyone else.
You wrote poems as if they were Vermeers. With a Vermeer veneer.
To be so nice you’d step aside for a slug.
You kept an ostrich egg in the refrigerator to remind you of the lifestyle you’d rejected.
You liked to get yourself in trouble so you could get yourself out.
Or so you pretended.
Your whole life had been a talent contest.
A race where no one else grasped they were racing.
You have to face the fact that you will have a future that will look terrible.
Other things you set aside to say, “This is the way it was.”

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Dale Going’s new books are The Beautiful Language of Our Disaster (Codhill Press), awarded their Guest Editor Selection by Robert Krut, and For the Anniversaries of All Loving Kinds of Meetings (Albion Books). Sonnets of Succor and Sorrow, a manuscript of her collaboration with collage artist Marie Carbone, was a finalist for Fence Books’ 2025 Ottoline Prize. Her work has been supported by the Fund for Poetry, California Arts Council, and Residency Fellowships at Yaddo, Watermill Center, Wedding Cake House, and Djerassi. Recent journal publications include Annulet, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, VOLT, among others. She lives in New York City after a previous lifetime in the San Francisco Bay Area. https://linktr.ee/dalegoing