Manifesto

More open windows on a summer night. More
coolness from the tongue of a conch shell

& warmth from a towel left for hours in the sun
& New Orleans growl in art-museum jazz. More
shoes with the heels worn out & cross-hatched

sidewalks under fan palm trees & star nurseries
blooming through my daughters’ mouths. More close-ups

of faces in photographs of cities getting bombed
& study of which direction their eyes are looking.
More light that can escape from black holes.

More baby blue-belly lizards scooting away from boots
& making it to the shadowed underside of rocks. More

thread for pants slashed at the knees & crabgrass
that can nose through astroturf. Bring on the live voltage
of the future tense to shake load-bearing beams.

Show me a kind of math that can account for the cruelty
a hurricane whips down when it meets land & the beauty

of the blush-lit spun-sugar clouds it leaves behind
& my need to remember the pummeling so I can harden
when the next storm comes but still

leave me the ability to round up.

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Jia-Rui Cook is a Chinese-American writer, editor, and producer in Los Angeles. Once a staff writer at the L.A. Times and the news events and projects lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she is the senior communications officer at the California Wellness Foundation. Her poetry has recently appeared in Alta Journal, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, Mom Egg Review, Missouri Review, and Puerto del Sol. Jia-Rui can be found on Instagram @funjiable.