Jolia Einstein

THESE DAYS

Noah works construction.
He leads me down hallways
without walls into half-finished rooms.
Clutching my pocketbook, I follow his trench coat,
his briefcase hovering over plywood.  
“The nice thing about this lot,”
he says, “is the view out the back window,
five hundred acres under farmland protection
from the Garden State.”  
We step through what soon will be
the front door, out to a yard of hay and seed.  
 
Across the Atlantic, a trillion-ton
rock flank falls from the western face
of a volcano on the island of La Palma.
Noah’s cell phone rings.  
“Can I call you back?” he asks.  
Before I have time to believe or not,  
a tsunami shaped like the New York skyline
comes crashing, undeveloping
the development. Even the asphalt
cul-de-sac erodes. As the water spreads thin,
all that’s left is a clean lamb unfenced,
mingling with a cow in the sea-foam.

Jolia Sidona Einstein teaches English at Santa Monica College in California where she lives with her fiancé, Jordan, and their cat, Ned. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from the University of Florida, following a BA in English in Boston University.