DUST BOWL DREAMS
BOSTWICK
Grandmother did not cross the Dust Bowl to stick me in your kitchen, confused as to why you won’t propose. Her teen hands did not work the family farm or sew the dresses she wore to school for this. She did not wipe dust, sweat, dirt and blood from her face for me to wonder about our future.
My father did not fight in Vietnam for me to come home to broken dreams and promises made of smoke. Did not take a puncture wound to the leg for me to punctuate pleasant conversation with tense plastic smiles.
I am made for greater things.
I am made of greater things.
My teenage mother did not board planes— afraid, wide-eyed— Travel thousands of miles across the world for me to choke back tears— The same flavor as the Asian food your father mocks as we order dinner, “What do you call a Chinese man who….”
An ocean escapes in tiny drops down my glass skin face. The galaxies inside me rearrange themselves into new constellations. The ancestors whisper in my ear, “Leave him, leave him, leave him…”
And then I am gone. Like your car speeding out of the parking lot. Like the purse I once left under a nightclub table... The anxiety is gone, and I am free.
No one ever taught him how to dream—
How to be made of greater things,
How to be made for greater things.
FELL THIS GIRL
BOSTWICK
He looked up at me over the blacktop rim of his Ray-Ban glasses, perfectly perched on his designer nose, and said something I couldn’t hear over the hazel of his eyes. As he spoke, I skated down the thin edge of his spectacles, riding along the natural lines of what would have been an almost handsome face were it not for the upturned tip of his nose. This insult to nature would constitute a lack of beauty in any other man. Still, on S.M.B., the strangeness of his nose was the very thing that set an otherwise forgettable face off into otherworldly beauty. At the forwardmost point of his silhouette sat the perplexing intersection of masculine roughness and delicate grace— this puzzled me, almost to the very point of love.
FELL THIS GIRL 2
He looked up at me over the blacktop rim of his glasses, perfectly perched on his designer nose, and said something I couldn’t hear over the hazel of his eyes. I skated down the thin edge of his spectacles, holding my breath under the two mossy green pools of his gaze before falling, haphazardly, down the rabbit hole of love. His words were muffled, warm vibrations of soothing sound, and suddenly, I was at the bottom of a summer swimming pool, his voice music permeating the water as light danced on the surface of a perfect day. I suddenly noticed he was waiting for me to answer him, and as I came up for air, “What?” was the only thing I could think of to say.
A CALIFORNIA STORY
BOSTWICK
To the north, tiny tornados of smoke rose and vanished skyward. How do I describe Los Angeles County to you but as this endless, vast ocean of urban sprawl? The best way to describe it is in the emotion evoked when you look at it. The way a man lost at sea sees the ocean. The movies lie. They sell you the dream of California. The pre-packaged idea of California. The California of my childhood was not a dream in the typical sense other than something, years later looking back, I wish was a dream instead of a reality that haunted me for decades. I forgot, I opened with the city burning and left it there on the stove. Let me go back.
I grew up with a single father and a mother that left before I can remember. My grandmother and father raised me… until they did not. In 1992 we drove to the top of Signal Hill to watch the Riots. I remember the smoke, curling towards the sky, dotting the landscape, the only thing marking any type of placement in the vastness of Los Angeles county. Years later, I want to lie and tell you I ate ice cream while we watched the city burn. Ice cream is easier to talk about, an easier allusion to the unspeakable, like childhood, like innocence, the way it melts down your hand, slips through your fingers, and disappears, swallowed up by the black tar pavement beneath you. The truth is there was no ice cream. We were just there- watching the chaos from a safe distance. I did not know at the timewhy he needed me to watch it, remember it, and be able to build years later from my memory the picture of Los Angeles on fire, of people burning down, of civil unrest and rage; of heartbreak and innocence going up in smoke.
They beat a man on the news. From the coffee-cream-colored carpeting on my grandmother’s floor, I stared up at the television and watched them. The violence splashing across our small zenith television and hitting me in my subconscious. It was the following year that we drove up to Signal Hill. On April 29, 1992, a jury on the news said they did not beat the man. They announced the verdict at 3 PM, the city burned by 6 PM and I stood tip-toed upon the top of Signal Hill watching the fires by 7 PM. The City- She burned because she felt rage move inside her with no way of getting out. People burning themselves down, burning their neighborhoods down, birthing their frustration-bred rage in a bath of smoke and noise.