Jake Young: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Jake Young

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Jake Young

Three Poems

Canal Street, Santa Cruz, CA

 A crash interrupts the mosaic of fall sounds

along Canal Street. The people stopped

on the sidewalk murmur it was an accident,

witnesses to an event that transpired

without fault, as if agency had somehow

vanished like the lavender’s purple

when night falls, or how a field of them

behind my house burned to ash

only days ago as the crowns of redwoods

flared up like fireworks in the dark.

It’s October. A button falls from a coat.

A pelican dives into the crashing surf.

The pinnate leaves of the maples burst

into flame. What happened here? 

Always the same question.

Grief grows like a forest, moments

held together in an ecology of anguish.

These days, a single cornflower

can make me weep. Later, when

only shards of broken glass are left

in the street, the crowd long departed,

I think how this night could be any night

and wonder what it will be like to leave

this world with barely a trace.

Ode to the Onion

Sweet secret of the earth

swelling in the damp darkness,

your green shoot signals

surrender to the harvest

when your bulb has grown

swollen and fragrant.

Amethyst allium, you

delight every dish you grace.

The tears we shed for you

are tears of joy

at what you promise—

biting kiss of raw delight.

Caramelized, you become

almost saccharine, supple,

savory beyond belief.

Peel away your layers,

exposed, you stain fingers

with your scent, lingering

in the air. Geode made flesh,

your concentric rings

reach every culture.

Pungent prince of the sauté pan,

you flavor the world.

Forgive Me This

When the last plum goes missing,

when we speak some hurtful truth

without thinking, or worse,

out of spite, when we forget

to pick the child up from school,

we ask for forgiveness, wanting

the swell of anger or shame to wash

away the trail of our misdeeds

like receding waves upon the shore

erasing footprints in the cold, wet sand.

But what is life but its own kind

of forgiveness for having been born?

The world whispering, I’m sorry,

and for this, you will suffer.

You will build a home out of

all the times you left someone

shaking with rage in the kitchen,

the water flowing from the tap,

ignored—we want someone

to turn it off for us, sit us down

on the couch and offer us a cup

of tea and a piece of chocolate,

but we know better; that is not

forgiveness, just a slow moving on,

caught up in a spinning rivulet

of time, thinking about how

when we ask for forgiveness

what we really mean is please

let me be other than who I have become,

which you grant yourself, always

becoming other every moment,

a leaf changing color in fall,

the air moving in all directions,

and each of us, the site of it all,

a place for giving.

Author Bio:

Jake Young is the author of the poetry collections American Oak (Main Street Rag, 2018), What They Will Say (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and All I Wanted (Redhawk Publications, 2021), the co-translator with Rebecca Pelky of the poetry collection Desnuda / Naked by Matilde Ladrón de Guevara (Redhawk Publications, 2022), the essay collection True Terroir (Brandenburg Press, 2019), and the novella Shared Perspectives, winner of the 2024 Orison Fiction Prize. He received his MFA from North Carolina State University, his PhD from the University of Missouri, and his MPH from the University of Chicago. Young serves as Poetry Editor for the Chicago Quarterly Review.