Pratik : PRATIK DOUBLE LA ISSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET SUZANNE LUMMIS' POEM, "Bossing Los Angeles:

Monday, August 16, 2021

PRATIK DOUBLE LA ISSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET SUZANNE LUMMIS' POEM, "Bossing Los Angeles:

SUZANNE LUMMIS

Bossing Los Angeles

Don’t move east, Quake Queen—

not even a couple feet. Don’t slide

open in daylight, in public places. Strike

a bargain with Earth—hey,

you know to close deals.

L.A., comfort our stalled careers. Budge faster

our 6 p.m. autos stuck to the One-O-One.

On the Eastside keep secret your secret

places and byways—staircase

of tiles and crushed shells,

Chicken Boy.

Don’t let the Westsiders know.

Water

your stub-toed river a bit,

Hard-to-Drown-In-River.

Write your own poem, Big Girl,

without using the word

dreams.

See? Impossible, even for me.

Do that thing you do

at night—let your erased past

ghost dance down your strip

of boulevard, Sunset, stretch

of street that began beyond your city

limits, anyone’s

limits, given to vice and mobster

crime. Now? Argon, Helium, Xenon.

Neon.

If blood could shine, if light

could bleed, it would be Neon,

or it would be L.A.

Suzanne Lummis was a 2018/19 COLA (City of Los Angeles) fellow, an endowment from the Cultural Affairs Department to distinguished mid-career artists or poets to create a new body of work. She has poems forthcoming in Luvina (U. of Guadalajara), and Saw Palm, a special issue on Florida Noir. Poetry.la produces her web series on film noir and poets influenced by that style and sensibility, They Write by Night.

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