Hot January
“Hot January” is a multi-media composition that presents an acute account of the urban flora and fauna of Southern California. The images are influenced by the inescapable glow of a citrine landscape characterized by its abiding amicable weather; rarely ever disturbed by the brief passing through of rain, on its way to somewhere less agreeable.
In accompaniment with these images is my own poetic verse, documenting the moment to moment subtleties of the massive disruptions to modern societal life. These ideas are meant to encourage reflection, to incite any insight that may otherwise be absent.
Hot January
A call to look out and then a firework lept at my ankles
snarled red then shattered celebrating the breathy end of a year rocked by explosions
That drove us all further apart
That drove us all out into the middle of nowhere left us for dead
A black man handed me a lighter and I hope I conveyed through my champagne haze how much it meant to me, to be given such a useful pastel thing by someone who was washed in fire by this year, someone who was killed by this year, someone who has always been killed by someone who looks like me
The nearby aquarium was painted blue with a bluer whale on the side
Not the blue of the sea or the sky
But of something pretending to be either, or anything
pretending to belong in the open space that used to be there
pretending that it’s natural to pay admission to see what was natural
A bench cradled the four of us and I noticed the line of planted trees submerged in concrete,
how they had been placed by people to punctuate between the street and the trolly tracks.
I thought about how space limits and divides us all--
How someone’s bigness often pushes on someone else’s smallness
Looking up, the sky was close and a nauseating shade of green grey
Dark of night steadily siphoned away by the steady accumulation of human brightness.
I wondered how long before even the stars were an ancient forgotten thing,
The crowning disavowment: when the world we have created finally outweighs
the one we did not.
When we were steady enough, we stumbled our way back down the wharf like a V of birds;
One often branching off into a bordering bush
The acapella of human release punctuated the distant yelling of
shadowy figures who have likely been out in the cold for a long time.
