California Story
This is the life, driving fast,
being one place in the morning
and someplace else in the afternoon,
driving all day to Los Angeles
because my father is sick again,
passing the time doing a kind of
car dance with my arms and upper body
as if on my way to a party, the next day
ready to drive my father, who has
that nasty infection in his leg, down
the canyon from his house, swinging
into and out of the curves, playing
with gravity, my father
at my right, like Ed McMahon,
although skinnier (imagining
Ed drove a big Caddie back in the day)
laughing at my jokes, while
someone with lots of money
hugs our rear, someone, who
I’m convinced, will also die one day,
making a right on Hollywood Blvd
into the glare, reaching for my shades,
taking a left on Fairfax, a right on Franklin,
a left on La Cienega, knowing these streets
have often played themselves on TV,
my father pointing out Alex Trebek’s
house (again) which looks
a lot like the Starship Enterprise
(thinking it had to land somewhere)
and thinking we might get tacos after or a
cheap cone at the Rite-Aid on Sunset,
but first the hospital complex
where the beautiful go to die, where
I put on my serious face and ask
all the right questions, even though
in a few months, he will die too
and this party will have to stop.
Dinner out at the Brown Derby, night three of the Watts Rebellion
To watch my father
snap his fingers and order
a famous salad
in a restaurant
shaped like a big brown hat
in August to be almost ten
in a red booth
in a pink dress, in
a restaurant like a hat,
in 1965, to feel the heat
from the fighting
eleven miles south
at the other end
of the Miracle Mile, across from
a famous pink hotel,
a ballroom kitchen
still spotless, the assassin’s pistol,
not yet loaded,
the three bullets, not yet fired
and the other Kennedy
not dead yet, to know
and to not know,
waiting for a Cobb salad
to arrive, wearing a
petticoat like frosting
solid and silky, still opaque,
like our mother’s Crisco
before it hit hot Teflon.
Paula Stacey’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, and The Los Angeles Review, among other publications. She is currently a student in the MFA program at San Diego State University and serves as managing editor of Poetry International.
