Sarah Palmer at the Elk’s Point #9
(after Twin Peaks: The Return, episode 14, 2017)
Some will say it’s poor form to order Bloody Marys
at night, but it’s poorer form to saddle up to me at the bar
and try to hook up, don’t you think? I told you to go away.
I said please. The “Truck You” t-shirt you’re wearing reminds
me of last June when I refused to get out of a minivan outside
Joplin, MO, but I can tell you this is a country of roads and
truckers and so few faces. But what did I know? I held griefs
close, every parenting misstep, every barroom refusal, every
no thank you but some men can’t hear such a solid answer.
Look, maybe I seem lost, easy, but are you sure you want
to mess with a woman with this much shatter and trespass?
I think most any mother would tell you that when I stand up
from my bar stool, turn to you slowly, tear off my once
resplendent face and ask Do you really want to fuck with this?
that I just wanted my Bloody Mary (poor form), and not to
reveal my daughter’s sweetest smile inside the darkness, not
to rip your throat out, until you are as muffled as I have been,
and I have been this, born not of ferocity, but of heartbreak.
“LA’s Famously Bizarre Apartments Could Never Be Built Today”
—SF Gate, November 2024
I didn’t recognize them until I left them
then let decades pass then took another look.
I spent my formative years in those
built-on-stilts quirks, those symbols of the
city of Los Angeles we resisted with out-
of-state license plates until we finally stopped
trying, gave up walking three blocks to the
drugstore because driving somehow made
more sense in the relentless sunshine—more
ease please! I used to take my rainbow roller
skates out front to the tuck-under car park
and while my mother chatted on the phone
to New York City, upstairs in our avocado green-
flecked kitchen, I’d skate up and down the slight
slope which felt exhilarating and risky because
I was small, curious, and so quiet that the man
who flashed his dick at me from the radiant
white of the sidewalk (and then nodded
approvingly at the both of us) knew I’d never say
anything. And here I am 45 years later saying it
all, saying I, too, felt that aroused by the
architecture, popular and populist, and titled
in space age script The Riviera or The Castle
or The Rocket, because inside it’s just a chasm
and I tried for 13 years to fill it, to outrun
any future that would have me, this future
like a stylized and far-out atom bomb and I
learned to carry the dingbat inside of me to
the other coast, where my brain stops working right
and the doctor looks over my MRI scan and finds
The Errand, The Roller Skate, The Rainbow, The
Flasher, The Casualty, The Legacy, The Debris.
