|
UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
|
|
SETH DAVID ASHER
Inland Empire The edge of Los Angeles trickles like bile to the edge of the San Bernardino shit hole where the desert jostles uncomfortably beside new homes and new wives and new trees tied to wood posts, too young to grow strong on their own, not accustomed to the desert climate that we tend to forget is our climate. The shopping malls sited 3 to each city street beckon the preteen girls, silicone mothers, fathers who count their debt the same way you count stars. New cars and new boats and new dreams paid with plain stamps and minimum monthly payments, forty hours per week driving an old backhoe, overtime when you can get it. The mountains crease into shadow in the evening when the smog crafts a witch’s halo of twilight and offers twenty minutes of beauty despite dead cans and dead butts and dead dogs rotting in the gutter that flows to the ocean fifty miles west, a million worlds away. Used-up refuse, here to Texas. I-15 cuts the gray mountains, cuts the suburbs; maybe I’ll ride it right up to Salt Lake City, maybe take a detour to Vegas or Denver. Pack the old Dodge, pay the last rent and find a shit hole not so close to the ocean or girls who kill with a glance and a bikini strap. Yep: Us Inland folk need to go east. Seth David Asher has worked as a script development intern under Richard Donner, and as a production assistant on numerous independent films. He currently teaches English at Cal Poly, Pomona, where he is pursuing graduate study in rhetoric and writing. |
|
© 2004-2009 Underground Voices |
|
|