dawn

one

If Eden was rotting, Los Angeles would be Eden.

The palm trees are heavy with balmy breath of the Earth, heavy with its sickness, heavy with its hot love. They bear no fruit except the dead parrots we shoot at with pebbles and slingshots, like we learned David did in church. God calls to us in her satin panties with her hair in pink curlers, from behind the rippling linens on the clothes line. We can't see her but we know she's there. We hear her shepard voice of sheep wool calling for us to go home. The big kids in the city eat apple pie with worms living inside, and buy mushrooms from gardens snakes, and Eve is fat, and eats as many peaches as she wants, and Adam is in love with David, but he's fucking Abel.

In truth Dawn doesn't know which one she is, but she loves Los Angeles most of all.

She wants to spread it like mustard on all their sandwiches, and never peel off the crust. She'd eat all the crust (even though it's got a name like "crust", and who the hell would want to eat that). Well she would eat it if it tasted like the city.

Dr. McNamara always makes this point that the city is bad for her, cause of all the night noise, and in college, she should open up to a quieter school, somewhere green all over. Dawn likes it though. Maybe that's because sometimes she likes her sickness.

There are always dogs barking. Because everybody needs pit bulls to scare off burglars. They bay and howl at the moon in beautiful choruses when fire trucks drive through the neighborhood at night, their sirens blaring. The helicopters buzz with the mosquitos, and their search lights from the sky shine into her window and wander over her bed sheets, and her albums, and the art that is on her walls and the art that is her body.

It's like living on Mars. Desert cold, and lonely with landscapes like dormant volcanoes. All the people with their heads fat and their white eyes gone black from car exhaust. So close to earth, watching all the births and deaths and the human tears falling like spider eggs carrying rocket ships and rovers sent to search for life on our red planet. Looking for band aids for the smooth cut knife wounds of no Gods, and no kings, and no answers.

It's exactly like living in Mars. Everybody wants to know if there's really life here, water here. Everybody wants a piece. Everybody calls them Martians, big headed aliens who walk too slow, speak too funny, so out of touch with society. But they're all gonna party here when the world ends. The blue planet will flake off with the cosmic winds one day, and their tongues will drip for the taste of cherry red earth.

Sometimes she pretends she's in Cuba in the 60's. The smell of jasmine wafts through her window, and she can't tell if they're dying or releasing sex pheromones, but it intoxicates her. The smell of life and death making love smells like aged whiskey. Smells like some kind of dream in limbo.

In her drunken daze she steals her Tia's milky silk robe off the clothesline even if it's still damp with night cold, the fabric licks her body like angel tongues. She does her knotted curls in a loose bun, steals a stubby cigarette from her aunts abalone ash tray, smokes her grubby burnt cigarette out her crumbling window.

Inhales the smoky sky. She straddles the pane, her dirty toes playing with the iron stairs below her window. She hasn't shaved her legs in months. The hair stands at attention about to fight the city, and she is more of a weapon than a woman.

Her body is soft, billows in the breeze like gossamer, her hair twinkles with starlight and cat fur. Her spider eyes are narrow in clusters across her forehead. She imagines rolling all her 8 spider eyes at pretentious intellectual parties drinking dry alcohol, swearing in Spanish at men who try to condescend her, all her many lovers and the lace underwear she leaves behind in their beds (she ignores the Cold War, people turned to dogs, neon blood in their mouths, gone rabid with the crimson infection of communism, and the writhing red vein in Fidel Castro's neck). She imagines everything she paints not being shit.

But then the lights from Mr. Chin's basement flicker on, and he wobbles out like a skeleton on splintered toothpick legs and rusty doorknob knees, in plaid boxers and sweaty socks, and a white shirt with a grease stain like a yellow tea rose, like the neon one that adorns his dim sum shop, and yells at the dogs to shut up. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Cantonese. Sometimes waving a stick around in the dark. Never with his glasses on. She shakes her head, peels off her night skin like a selkie woman. Sleeps with poison boiling behind her throat.

Pulls on sweatpants and goes back to sleep, and says "I'm not childish" 8 times until she gets embarrassed that her eyes are still open and her hands are still in fists.

She dreams about hearts, ugly in their apartment anatomy; somebody is always living inside those boxy compartments, somebody is always banging pots and pans, somebody is always clogging pipes and growing mold.

Everyone inside her complains about the pipes. They drip sweet red liquid from the ceiling, thick and metal tanged, the tongue tasting the feeling of skull collision with street signs. She wants to say she can't help it.

She thinks she's a God of rain. Crying from her perch in heaven, coating all her loved ones in cloud dew, heart ache, in her red liquid pain.