Rachel Alarcio
LA GRADUATION: ABSTRACTION
Cap. Gown. Shivering in dresses and dress shirts.
Soaked socks cling
to toes like plastic-wrap to skin.
Violet-tinged
lightning
strikes cement.
Commencement of the rest
of your life.
On the corner, there’s an ancient sofa
sopping, sooty, stained with that dead person stench.
Graffiti sticks to stucco, and May Gray chokes downtown
skyscrapers like a musician grips a guitar neck
about to drop.
This type of life is not a pipe. Dream for the bedhead deadbeat
who shoves a stolen shopping cart from 99 Cents, across from the tent
cities of freeway bridges. This life is death in a glass elevator,
ceiling invisible, yet, you see the shoppers clearly.
And they see you
on display in HD
as you descend, salt
through a strainer.
The city is
not a movie.
That trench is
not a river.
This is
real life.
Palm tree
trunks bend
like the
backs of
ballerinas.
This is
the Treachery
of Images
in motion. Pictures on postcards
deceive dreamers.
The L.A. River’s a misnomer.
So is the City,
of Flowers and Sunshine.