"Made in Los Angeles" - by Linda Anne Hoag

Los Angeles offers me back to myself
like a pupu platter at Don the Beachcomber,
enrobes me in succulent fat, rumaki style,
my spare rib Eve to her Adam.

Newly minted I prowl down Hollywood Boulevard
shop windows mirror me, decades loop and fold:
there, in Frederick's, a grave girl in a navy blue uniform
stares at garter belts and marabou mules,
in Larry Edmunds, cinematic synesthesia
sight of patchouli, smell of paisley.

Los Angeles is my family album
Cross Roads of the World slips photo corners
around my first kiss, at St. Thomas Episcopal,
a snapshot of an angel child with cardboard wings
tilts rakishly on an ink black page.

Los Angeles is my jewelry box
whose trays slip effortlessly over the drawers below.
At Crescent Heights, old Route 66, I open today's door
am deafened by the Starwood, shocked by risque puppets.
I slide into the Carmel movie theatre to sob at Old Yeller,
land at Vangie's Cafe, just in time
to fill the ketchup bottles at the end of my shift.

Los Angeles is my book of days
my pages so interleaved with hers
that we write over and over each other
a tale with a trick ending that fools us every time.

(For more on the Keep-a-Breast Silent Auction at the Acorn Gallery, see Edith Abeyta's blog, link at right.)