Echo Park

Horse Names

Echo Park
The parking lot after 9 pm. The truck pretending to be empty on the front lawn. The barred windows, the small yellow walls, the poodle-mix chained to a hole. The black barking, the florescent buzz, the winged beetles, flinging themselves at the endless electric light.

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Dream Without You

we ride our bed like a boat, like a stupid horse, down West 4th Street, trying to speed up by clapping, by calling names, but it floats slowly, like a blind retarded child, past the street signs, over the steaming cabs and I turn to ask you about your sick dog /phone which broke/barked horribly yesterday when you threw it out the window, but you have gone, leaving one slipper, and your retainer, glittering, yes, like gold

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Tristessa
we gave each other horse names and galloped around the edges of the soccer field during recess I held strands of your long soft pelt behind you as if they were reins we clucked to each other when we wanted to move, the clicking of the tongue riders use along with their heels, a sound like stuttering cicadas, when the boys hit you and made you fall down I hit them back you were twelve and you used pills, not very many, the first time you tried to unravel

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Dampen
that winter after my father left the rain wouldn't stop, soggy telephone poles dropped their thin-fingered electrical cables into our driveway, but he had already taken the good car, the Mazda, left us the pick-up while the houses started to come undone, tilting like insomniacs' tents, overnight our neighbors' bungalow collapsed and slid like a canoe into the apple orchard where deer picked through the mud, their hooves sticking, three species of algae speckling the hair around their mouths as their low heads tongued the wormy flattened fruit; they had already learned to eat the damage themselves.

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The Mule Deer

Everywhere children are crawling out from under beds. The deer are like broken chairs rebuilt in the shape of a horse. They have the faces of cows, move like awkward architecture. They have killed several who lived on my street hunters or children who tried to feed them pancakes. I see them every morning as I draw my curtains. They are destroying the garden, the squash, the tomatoes, marigolds, string beans, the beetle-peppered roses. They keep me awake at night rustling the rhododendron I imagine men with knives, as sad children often do. The bucks rub their antlers on the front step in the fall, the does chase us down the driveway when we stare at their fawns, they knock down fences, dive through wind-shields, shadow us on our hikes. We have town meetings, shriek about control and acceptable losses, while they toss our babies in the fields of wild wheat.

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My First Death: The High Window

White moths rise like steam: dawn bright as a headache and I'm still breathing in a birdcage of gristle, tendon -lawn clippings up my nose, whole except for an absent molar, my brother dancing his red yo-yo above my face, singing his song about the bees, the one that repeats, the one he always gets wrong.

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