Flush Left | Lisa Alvarez | 01 11 23

Weather Report for the April 12, 2021 KKK Rally in Huntington Beach, California


The clouds are broken.
California’s KKK Grand Dragon walks with a cane.
The police ride horses. 

The air quality is fair. 
“Fair” means the air is generally acceptable for most. 
However, sensitive groups may experience 
minor to moderate symptoms from long-term exposure.

The first person arrested is a Black man.

It is 64 degrees 
but the “real feel” is 74.
Wind gusts out of the south-southwest 
are clocked at 8 miles per hour.

The clouds remain broken.
There is only a one percent chance of rain
but it could rain.
It could.

—Submitted on 09/25/2022

Lisa Alvarez is a coeditor of Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers (Heyday, 2021) and Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday, 2017). Her poem have appeared in Air/Light, Huizache, and Rise Up Review, among other journals. She holds an MFA in fiction from UC Irvine and co-directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers in the Sierra Nevada.

Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered publication.