Kolleen Carney Hoepfner's poetry and other writings can be found in Rabid Oak, Memoirs Mixtape, Glass, Occulum, and elsewhere. Kolleen serves as Editor in Chief of Drunk Monkeys, and is the Managing Editor and Social Media Coordinator for Zoetic Press. She is the author of Your Hand Has Fixed the Firmament (Grey Book Press) and A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Her main goal in life is to have Alec Baldwin smile at her. She lives in Burbank, California, with her husband and children.
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Take Fountain California is burning all of it but really the heartheat is right here
in Los Angeles where everyone is suddenly bad but you know
they were always bad, always been this way— bad men
(and women too) but mostly men probably all the time— men.
Anyway we’re on fire, there’s no end in sight, just a steady fall of
ash
and all the air is just smoke and we can’t stop coughing and the cars are
filthy
so I don’t even bother to go to the car wash. I just wipe
the windshields at the gas station.
All those pink stars on the sidewalk
are a dingy
grey and they don’t shine anymore. Los Angeles is cracking right down the middle like a disaster movie which makes
sense
I guess. Here. I drive to work and pass
mansions pass homeless people pass oil rigs and pass billboards
but I think that’s what I love about it. It may sound stupid but have I ever told
you
how my chest burns maybe with smoke
but also
when I glance
down Hollywood from Vine and everything is lit up like Christmas
(especially at Christmas), how my heart feels
how the city sometimes still feels like hope or magic, the magic promised
in movies.
How do you get to Hollywood?
Take Fountain, take Fountain, take
Fountain I repeat to myself as I drive to work avoiding the
freeway—here they’re called freeways not
highways.
For every broken woman there
is a woman refusing to be broken.
Hollywood. For every predatory
man there is a man—
no— scratch it.
For every man
there are a hundred women.
And they have discovered
they’ve always had teeth
to tear.
Hollywood. We can fix this,
maybe this city. We can put
our elbows into it really scrub until it’s
a new kind of shiny
once we realize it’s not soot covering everything, not ash,
just a
dense layer of men.
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(This poem borrows from Anne Jardim and maybe, loosely, Maggie Smith as well.)