About
Winner of the Spring 2011 Black River Chapbook Competition
Some poetry feels like coming home. Some poetry leaves us that much more complete, puzzle-piecing our disarrayed world back into a shape we recognize (that’s me, that’s us). But this isn’t it. This is a poem about Los Angeles, the Queen with the bloodstained kerchief we scurry to pocket: she watches through lidded eyes. Fairy kingdom gone feral. Children gone to ground, moving from burning house to burning house…City that is a Fibonacci sequence, story that is all mouth, falling into its own silence. City that is a story it tells itself, rocking back and forth in its own arms, a long goodbye and a light left on.
This is a story about telling stories, the paths not taken (but you took every one, gave not one back, never returned). Here, if anything is anything, the roads are rope the city binds itself with. If the city binds itself inevitably it pulls the ropes tight, till the skin chafes and bleeds, till it sighs with the ecstasy of its own bruising, its bright discolorations rising to the skin like an ancient map that led nowhere, nowhere at all, which was where we always wanted to go, disappearing into the tying of the final knot. From anywhere at all. City that ties itself up for its own amusement, straining on the magician’s table: audience of none.