Two museums

New Los Angeles poem

Hallucinating assorted demigoddesses from distant corners of mental mythology
Astrological figures of a TV childhood and a
Desperate young adulthood
Stories that take up space
Where Biblical allegories used to

Alanna Haim entering a parking lot in her Subaru?
Ricki Lake on a balcony at the Getty?
A closer look and they vanish.

The thick pack of chads attached to a stack of paper
Whose holes have been punched
but not all the way through.

I keep them all there on purpose and hold on to them for as long as they will let me.

Apples in a hot pan.

Three girls who could have been my friends,
but I confront one about using her water bottle to briefly try to save a seat,
which I take, without asking,
and then ask her honestly and without malice what she was hoping to do
with her water bottle,
since the tram to the museum was so crowded.

It is clear that talking to her is an affront.

“Well that was crazy.” One says to the other afterward

when she thinks I’m not listening.

Earlier,

A different museum
Of things that are all very real to you,
until reading about it after and
learning that everyone else has the experience of questioning whether the exhibited information is real.

“It takes you a second to realize that it’s not real.”
A woman says, when you talk to her.

You tell her her nails remind you of the butterfly wing scale sculpture.

Those were real.

Men fall temporarily into shallow pools I can see all the way through. They are stuck in sand. I tell them about the pool with great detail and they sit still for a bit.

The moment I do not fear confrontation is the moment I am perceived as mad.

The smell of wet mesquite, romantic, suburban, and desperate. Flies buzzing at the lamp lighting a teenage boys’ soccer practice. It will always be that for me.

A sign warns me that mountain lions

Rattlesnakes

And coyotes

Live near this paved path and

Are not bothered by the crackle of the tram

Nor the roar and whistle of the 405.