LA

by Terry Stevenson

 

We forget

where priests buried the Indians

and where the Valley got its water.

We debate how close

to a fault line we can build the subway.

The stress shows, LA falls apart.

I'm beginning to crack too.

Out spills my love child,

my marriages and divorces,

three ex-wives and my lover,

the mother of my daughter,

now a teenager,

all legs and attitude,

out comes the Zoot Suit Riots, flat-brimmed hats

on that June night in '43

when the GIs went crazy,

beating up every pachuco they could find,

Belushi at the Chateau Marmont,

dancing in the penthouse

with the ghosts of Flynn and Harlow,

the Black Dahlia, Benedict Canyon, and Brentwood,

a history of sharp knives,

Chavez Ravine, families evicted

for O'Malley's Dodgers,

my father, murdered in Hollywood,

the Chinese Massacre of 1871,

the tongs pissed off the locals,

19 Chinese killed, 15 of them

hanged over Calle de los Negros,

Japanese-Americans living

in Santa Anita horse stalls

waiting for the trip to Manzanar,

the police retreat from Florence and Normandie,

letting the neighborhood burn.

 

 

Reprinted from Good Poems, American Places

edited by Garrison Keillor, Penguin Books, 2011.

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