Chato wasn’t sure what to expect. He’d heard the legends almost every weekend. His fists curled into themselves, not quite tight, not ripe to make a punch. Through the sheet that separated him from the rest of the living room guests, he heard the women speaking. Some weeping, some whispering like the noise of ninja stars in mid air. Chato thought about Ernesto and his eyes watered a little. Glancing down to find a tee shirt to wipe his face, Ernesto’s acceptance letter to UCLA reproached him. Chato comforted his pain by scrolling through his phone to call Chino and the crew. No answer. Chato looked up the wall and smiled at Ernesto’s awards. The rage flooded him. In between blurred thoughts, he could not understand how he and Ernesto had survived so much and suddenly cancer took down the person who meant the world to him.
Short
The lost poetry of Lou Reed — Tribrach: for those who love (or would like to love) poetry
‘We are the people who are desperate beyond emotion’: Lou Reed’s lost poetry to be published: Poetry reflecting on nationhood, sex and whiskey, written in 1970 after Lou Reed left the Velvet Underground, is to be published for the first time – Ben Beaumont-Thomas – The Guardian – 3/2/18 “The poetry comes from a six-month period […]
The lost poetry of Lou Reed — Tribrach: for those who love (or would like to love) poetry
one armed Jesus
“Whatcha got there, baby? Is so tiny.” She rasped and coughed through dried saliva crusted lips puckering in and out from an oval mahogany hole.
“It’s a little Jesus, but his left arm broke off, see? He kinda looks like a gun.” I responded looking at the damaged Son, offering her a peek.
“Oh, how that happen, baby?” She said licking her wide mouth and wiping the sour spit from the black corners.
“I’m not sure, maam. But I’ve had this Jesus for many years and He kinda never gets lost.” I answered gripping the tiny maimed Savior from His remaining arm while aiming it listlessly at a pigeon flopping in the rancid gutter water beneath our feet.
I turned to look at my companion as she swooshed some bottles around a grimy old Vons plastic bag. The rude lilac and blue back drop lighting from the 99₵ Store illuminated her matted gray hair and her red sweat suit varnished hard with the filth of the streets.
It was around 11:47 p.m. on a Wednesday that I found myself sitting on a graffitied bus bench in Hollywood. The street was dense with foreign cars, bleak in their ashy paint and dime sized nicks and dings. In the midst of the piss scented early spring drifts of night air she told me her name was Martha. I offered my hand and Martha declined politely by turning her face to the west. I looked at my hand, maybe it was dirty, but I couldn’t see much.
Porciuncula
The need for refuge beckons her to sit on the Pacific shore at 3 or 4 in the morning. With an eased mind, images of what the Tongva and Chumash peoples saw 8,000 years ago channel into her inner eye. Were her stars, their stars? Her moon, their moon, her sea, theirs? How many times had Hailey sprayed awe over a most sacred people whose spirit now inhabit museum cellars full of shells on the Wilshire Corridor?
Waves crawl atop of each other grasping at the salty air that dangles. Tired woman feet sink into the parts where the sand is dirty and pasty. An ancient destiny and nothing yet manifests. Tiny moist crabs send little winks of light like fire flies, only for her to see.
Currents swish around tired ankles inviting her to enter as a new lover does; into his soft troubled bed. Being of an unfinished spirit, she thinks of getting lost in the tremendous Pacific. Squinting, Porciuncula strains her eyes looking into the sooty darkness. Nothing but a stray speckled gull bereft of its home. She looks down at her legs wiggling to keep the briny cold at bay. Such is the juxtaposition of her emotions that the imagination’s pictorial bank issues an image of a monk on fire. Admirably grotesque. The siren of an ambulance wailing in the distance captures her attention. Surveying the gritty banks as she gets up to stroll back to the road, her eyes get stuck on a tiny heart shape shell. She smiles secretly. It’s a wink from God.
Like a pre-historic creature crawling from primordial soup, she lumbers toward her road. Such as the Cowboys and Indians, Porciuncula too had weathered many events on this Western shore. As she sniffs the thickness of the brackish kelp in the air, her mind floats to an early age when she learned to shut away thoughts, wrangle impulses and cram words sharply down her throat into the gut.
Porciuncula was born old in the land of the new frontier. Los Angeles. In time, words uttered by a simple child became tiny bell tolls propelling her into a black hole of law, guilt and polite despair. She had to have been born old. How else can one know to sit quietly and listen to the most infinitesimal crackles of salt water on sand as if to hear the soil pray to the sky gods of peoples and triumphs gone by?
words less spoken 