The Impossible Dream four starving artists all of us driving home through the dusty amber air of Riverside in the afternoon, three women and me, and I don’t know about them but everything I see in southern California is the beauty of the desert sliced away and imposed upon by unnatural plants and animals getting by on life support as the coyotes rebel with their hard paws against these asphalt aliens caring not at all for before us or after us and then we see it coming up on the left, an open orange grove with the fruits vulnerable and out there and beyond ripe for the taking “hey, you guys want some dinner?” and we pull off the road to the right, one of them stays with the car and the rest of us run across the radiating blacktop, and like monkeys we gather up the citrus from the ground and off the branches into our folded arms and we laugh as we’re tearing them open already, and we hurl two or three oranges at a time across the street over oncoming traffic to the girl manning the car and she misses most of them, we get so our pockets are stuffed and we can’t carry any more so we run back to the car cackling and take care not to drop the perfect balls of fruit on the street, and we get in and drive off as we sit there feeling like we’ve gotten away with a little something naughty and we bite into the sweet and dripping past from before the dreams of stardom and restitution before these places of the world were fenced off high from the likes of us before the pavement, the forgotten violence, and the dying world and so we fall asleep one more night in our shared room with bellies full and paper lunch bags for tomorrow.