Michael Miller: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Michael Miller

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Michael Miller

Five Poems

FLEDGLING

A girl leaves her body in the house, takes her spirit.

A woman brings both. The door swings behind.

The girl shrugs wings from between her shoulders.

A leaf breaks, then two. The woman folds her hands.

They won’t support the weight of you, she offers.

On a pole, fastened tightly, a flag whips around.

It is not a lifting now but a shrinking.

The girl extends her arms. Earth drops away.

Flight reduces to color, blue startling green.

Nothing could survive this fall. Nothing is falling.

That is only your spirit, the woman murmurs.

Mouths the girl: Not the point. Mouths the woman: It is.

CRASH TEST TECHNICIAN IN THE ASHRAM

When the swami said

   Close your eyes and sight will come

I took God’s view

      and kept them open:

a dozen strangers

            letting themselves 

   be watched and blessed,

   bone and lung rising slowly

      in the droop of sun

through propped window —

masterpiece of the outer light.

The last day was probably holy.

   Under the lamps

in the calibration lab,

      we pounded the dummy

as a maker might,

green dot on the scanner

   reading sensors in the plastic neck

   after the head slammed,

   chest lurched 

      from the palpitating weight,

   confetti of hoped-for glass

and then the ready impulse

for Netflix, 

   conversation, a long shared beer.

      The dummy plays martyr for the body,

the body for the soul,

   and whether or not the soul spares anything

we count our victories

      in the plastic

that springs back whole.

   Now the swami said 

Every trial

tempers your light

   and next Monday in the lab

   the harness will strain

a notch tighter:

heroic the effort

      we put into breaking things

in hopes of seeing them

                         not broken.

ROHINGYA REFUGEE TO THE COLLEGE STUDENT

The engine awaits you

and the driver is impatient.

Another Good Samaritan filled the gas tank.

Your kindness bids it go.

Even in my rags, I am not shocked by automation.

I have watched soldiers riding shotgun,

deemed their skin as soft as mine.

The engine awaits you — awaits us —

and its inventor earns our thanks.

With the Submit button’s tap,

you will put its power to use.

To wit: I need cans and an opener

and formula for the baby.

A single box will strain for wipes.

Can you scrounge the funds for two?

I am proud of my story

posted on the Stories page,

dictated with the words I knew

to the girl who typed and nodded.

Are we more sisters if at least one crack

on my hand curves the same as yours?

We cannot break bread together —

and need not want to —

so let us hail what we share.

With an iPad’s click, you dismiss the ocean.

The driver wishes both of us well.

Exalt your journey, then repeat it.

Your triumph is in the mundane.

Consider your steps like the explorer

who discovers the new world last.

FLIGHT PLAN

We trust our life to a savior

who would not reach to stop our death.

Sky is grace. We start with believing.

Dawn spreads above 

like a watercolor page

too wide for edges to show the white.

The one of us who is not religious

chants the Hail Mary before takeoff.

If no divine hand

guides the cockpit higher,

we will settle for eyes to watch it.

Name their color now.

The plane departs in seconds.

You paint them pink like blush,

I stray to broken-chalk blue.

Wheels roll and we sit still.

What picked us up will set us down.

To travel is much more dare than truth.

AFTER FINDING THE THEOREM THAT WILL TAKE US PAST MARS

You hover into the restaurant like one

who has gotten engaged

to a man who cannot speak.

Your silence shields your discovery from questions.

In the glare of lights 

and adjusted glasses,

its perfection may panic,

shrug its equal sign sideways

into greater-than or less-than.

The two parallel lines are the promise made.

Your confidence pins them apart.

On a napkin, at the table for two

that you claim for yourself

not in the corner,

you scrawl the equation on a napkin.

It seems tired of itself already —

the letters and numbers like a puzzle

that you loved for the solving,

its picture now trite.

The waitress comes with your water.

She is made of what she knows.

If you shouted your truth,

the glass in her hand

would fissure until it shattered.

It would not stop with her.

Every window, every doorknob

would splinter and spill

the obsolescence it hid.

You would nod and saunter out,

the coat you left behind

still draped, cooperatively, on the chair.

Author Bio:

A native of Orange County, Michael Miller is the co-founder of Moon Tide Press, which launched in 2006 to spotlight Southern California poets. He is the author of five books and worked for years as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and its community news, winning an Orange County Press Club award in 2014 for his story about poets Charles Bukowski and Lee Mallory. Currently, he teaches English and organizes the visiting-author program at St. Cyril of Jerusalem School in Los Angeles.