Your life becomes the protagonist’s, anyone’s, and the shiny sealed package of story is yours, is slathered all over your shaved calves like sunless tanning cream, and you are walking, marching alone across a bridge into the sunset, really you are, and a dull looking young couple tells you their destination and asks if they’re headed the right way and you say yes and yes again, and the girl-lady says I thought so instead of Thank you so you don’t feel bad for sounding emphatic when really you were unsure. And the light in the west and the lines of planes are making designs on the sky, huge as it ever was, and once you’re safely across the river “Ashes of American Flags” comes on and you shout this city’s name inside your head with private-public glee. What is so funny about peace, love, and understanding—your bare shoulders shove backwards, one then the other, you make it across the bridge as the spring sun sets on the cities layered like lemon cakes inside you, and your secret wish (all my lies are always wishes), your only request, is Trepan me, motherfuckers. Come see what’s inside.
Becca Klaver is a founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books and a PhD student in Literatures in English at Rutgers University. She is the author of the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009), and her first full-length collection, LA Liminal, will be published by Kore Press in 2010.
Leaving the Matinee