[Q: Who is going to make amends?]

Q: Who is going to make amends?

A:

It hit me as I was driving home at night from New York,
a strange longing for California, its egregious sky

rendered by smog, bright pink like a mouth
speaking something it wants. I wanted

to fear a person the way I did there; for that was, there,
the smallness of my life: I feared one person, a man;

I was horrified of what he thought of me, watching
as I turned my small leased car into my apartment,

how he could see that nothing was my own.
E. had loved me so much that he hated me;

he hated that he could not tell the story apart from the way it was told,
and I told too many stories, I could sense myself like that, infringing.

He was a child of film. He spoke of it like an infection,
and I remember agreeing, in a way I do not acknowledge.

Before I met him, I was planning to move to Los Angeles,
telling everyone who asked, it is so fake there, it’s real.

But I met him and pictured a child staring
at the great white plastic of the Hollywood sign,

amongst the houses that were the color of eyes,
how everything there was always at risk of burning—

I could not. There were ways that I could categorize myself,
language that collapsed my life into a film reel, entire swaths of it

denigrated to justs. Just college, just the years I was West,
just one night under his palm, in the lamp-lit room.

I was thinking of California, and how I was running out of justs,
that soon the sun there would settle into a mocked, electrical night,

and that this would be my life.




Reprinted from Gut (Omnidawn, 2021). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the poet and publisher.