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CloseTime Studies #1
The 4th of July, mom invited me to dinner. She invited others, too – they couldn't make it – the rest of the family was out of town, so it was only she (age 80) and I. Families throughout the neighborhood were barbecuing and eating outside; kids lit fireworks in the street. As I helped mom set out potato salad, green salad, steak and broccoli, the air filled with popping, concussive reverberations, snaps, booms. Somebody set off an M-80 in the intersection, a cloud of smoke blew a dusty breeze across our patio table. Sky rockets whistled and cracked.
We sat under the umbrella to eat. As we talked (I told her my brother said he was going to meditate today on what it means to be free), I thought someone threw a firecracker over the fence with a loud bang. Chips scattered across the tiles.
I picked a couple up; they were white and green pieces of plastic from the table and chair. A bullet had pierced the table top and cracked the brittle white chair opposite my mom and me; I jumped up to the street and leaned over the gate – as if there was anything to see – except for the five or six families across the street who had noticed nothing, chatting and barbecuing, their kids playing on the grass. Mom said, "Usually you're sitting there," as we finished eating, but anyone might've been there.
Time Studies #2
By Belmont High, surrounding hillsides empty lots after thirty five years of Urban Renewal, first turning into Beverly, old abandoned subway tunnel filled with Caltrans road maintenance equipment and supplies, once one of the only fields in the world still used for ullamaliztli, Mesoamerican ballgame, the ground torn up in mud and debris by bulldozers for condos and offices, at 1:00 AM I walked over the bridge above Yreina Cervantez's mural, past the Times Building and Little Tokyo, through the tunnel under Union Station upstairs to the Gold Line platform.
In the electric train slinking around the bends of the arroyo by Highland Park, the first car full of a dozen teenagers that night, sleepy, thoughtful, on edge, two black girls singing to each other – one says, "I'll pretend I was crying, I'll tell my mom I fell down, that's why my eyes are red," – the train speeds on station to station, hurtling us into our lives.
Sesshu Foster grew up in City Terrace, and he has taught composition and literature in East L.A. since 1985. He is the author of City Terrace Field Manual (Kaya Press, 1996), Atomik Aztex (City Lights, 2005), and American Loneliness: Selected Poems (Beyond Baroque, 2006). He was co-editor with Naomi Quiñonez and Michelle Clinton of Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry (West End Press, 1989), which won a 1990 American Book Award. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org.