The owner of a nail salon in the San Fernando Valley has bad nerves in October. This month is when the fire will occur. She leaves the news on. So many of her friends and so many of their homes in danger.

One day it rained ash. She drove home with the windshield wipers on. The sun, looking bigger than usual, burned a violent red through the smoke-filled air. Everything looked more beautiful through the haze, which saturated colors and blurred the edges of things.

The last two years have been bad. Last year’s statewide drought made possible a wildfire so huge that you could see it from space. Plumes of smoke showed up as a giant weather system in NASA satellite images.

Then there is the wind. The wind makes the fire. The Santa Ana winds come roaring through the mountains this time of year, mingling with wildfires in a dangerous chemistry, winding through trees and blowing under doorways; setting everyone on edge.

The wind rattles the windows of her storefront. When I walk in a gust of wind from outside nearly destroys a stock of nail polish, which balances on a narrow glass sill near the door. Lily’s place is staffed almost entirely by recent immigrants from Vietnam. She emigrated from there more than 20 years ago. She is my best friend’s mother, and I have known her almost that long.

Today we can’t see the fire from the shop, but it is happening in the surrounding hills. Occasionally bits of ash fall from the sky. She is worried about her daughter, my friend, who is driving in it. Sometimes she can smell the fire and hears them talking about it on the news.

Lily’s salon is identical to most others in the Valley. It is located on a strip mall and has large painted glass windows: “Spa Mani and Pedi / Waxing / Permanent Makeup; Beautiful!!!” Lily is the only reason I go to this one. She insists I visit her every once in a while and does not allow me to pay. Despite the draw of free pedicures for life I do not go very often because not paying someone to fuss with my fingers and toes goes against the grain.

I am going on this day because high school classes have been canceled on account of the fires. The salon is empty. Lily flags me into a station, pulls up a chair and talks with me for the remainder of my visit.

There is a strange intimacy about this. She touches my face, pulls snowflake ashes from my hair. She feeds bits of fruit and rice directly into my mouth while we talk, interrupting my sentences like I am her young daughter. This is how she cares. She cares also by worrying, which she does about her real daughter almost every hour of every day.

She says things like, “I hope Jennie is O.K., I never see her anymore and What do you think of her boyfriend? His hair so long and dirty!”

“He is OK,” I say, “but I think a little stupid.”

She will also say, “I remember the first time I saw you, I kept looking and looking because I wanted to know were you Chinese or American?”

And I remind her that I was both.

I think to myself, this is a woman who trained to be an architect and now she makes a living by giving bikini waxes to smug teenagers. She will send two daughters through college this way. They will train to be doctors or perhaps engineers, marry white men, and have blue-eyed children who are more American than anything else.

“You know, Angela, that when I was your age I was six feet tall!”

“Six feet!” I say.

“Yes, but since then I have been shrinking many inches.”

On the news they are still talking about the fire in the hills. The winds are picking up and blowing north, it is getting harder to fight. By now the sky has turned brown.

“Your mom must be worried,” she says. “You should get home. The fire only a mile from your house now.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “We should be safe.”

And we are. Later that night I sit with my family on the cliff above our house in Northridge as bright fire lines move across land to the south and the east. Our neighborhood is not in danger, so we watch. Through the smoke haze the Valley is sparkling like an endless grid of Christmas lights.

Much Was Said about Form

by Angela Mears

It was enough for me to be stretched out drunk on your bowlegged

backyard trampoline, the one you erected with strips of duct tape

ten summers ago this August. The air was wet and melted on the tongue

like chocolate. The creaking tire swing kept our time. Then you said

“The old poetics are dead,

it’s not enough to mean what you mean

anymore,” etc. etc.

We were lying beneath the arbors of your hunch-backed oak tree,

the one the municipality forbade you cut down because it’s, what,

thousands and thousands of years old. Splatters of mottled orange

sunlight shot through the branches, branding foreign shapes in our eyes.

Not wanting to change the subject too obviously I told you a poet’s not

worth reading if he doesn’t write about love, at least some of the time.

Everywhere I looked I saw the afterimage of the sun. Fuzzy imagined

green light shut out the yellow and red of a spectacular sunset.

I let you read me that Frank O’Hara poem about taking shits on Sundays.

The sun was almost down by now. Darkness brought a change to the near-

Autumn air. Frenzied squirrels fussing in the branches torpedoed

our gathering with acorn hand-grenades.

I should not have brought up Love.

Sticky Summer Heat

by Olivia Wainhouse

Sticky summer heat

Chasing perspiration down my flushed cheeks.

Wrestling hopelessly with comforters

Covers off–exposed and vulnerable,

Covers on–trapped bad thoughts,

Pervasive loneliness

of those endless summer nights,

Like a flipbook turned

by restless fingertips,

blending images together

to form motion

in a motionless night.

Summer day chases summer day

Like naïve fawns by a bustling highway

Daunting night

and dangling Chinese lanterns

faintly glistening in the distance

gently illuminating the unexpected.

Sticky summer heat

Forming pools of unrealized revelations

Dripping into the subconscious

and flirting with the restless.

Sticky summer heat

Chasing perspiration down my flushed cheeks,

Soft breathing interrupted by imminent sighs

of unquenchable frustration

Hushed by the mysterious summer of youth.

And sticky summer heat

Slumber hiding in the sheets

with the sun and the sensible,

Leaving questions unanswered

and a thick blanket of heat

Slowly suffocating its victim.

A Summer Haiku

By Micah Shapiro

Warm afternoons breathe

life into summer’s endless

mantra: “Go Cubs go.”