LA Weekly is now taking poetry submissions. Interested in having your work posted right here on our arts blog? Send previously unpublished poems along with an image to go with it to poetry@laweekly.com. Check out today's poem after the jump.

After Four Days of Hammering Rain

By Michelle Bitting

In which the troubling thought of sending you away

revisits like a tumor cloud drifting in and out

of an X-ray's gray and swirling firmament,

we go for a drive–a movie to forget

the tears and fists and shattered glass

and as we round the tree-fringed curve of Sunset Boulevard

where fancy houses float like angels

at the gates of stainless pastures,

pearled and out of reach

for almost everyone

on this battered, hell-plagued earth,

it is still raining, Son,

though bright rays plummet through the pour,

water and light,

two beautiful wrestlers

duking it out across our windshield,

which makes us smile, the muscles

of contention easing

so that reaching for your hand,

you don't let go or flinch

as something Technicolor arcs

across the sky ahead

and the road before us straightens,

steers us dead on into a turbulent blue.

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