I remember when we first moved in,
seeing your hedges shaped like dogs and your K-car and your dirty window-panes
and thinking this, this seems exactly right for California.
You called yourself Evil to distinguish your name from my mother’s,
but you let us have all the kumquats that rolled under the fence.
You showed us in your house once– I couldn’t have been more than ten– and it was dark.
You collected teacups and liquor and letters;
you let us in every room.
I remember learning later
that you were one of those who wrote to the inmates–
no, not the wrongfully jailed– that would be far too kind– but the killers there for life…
…i think you were a poet…
And did it give you some solace
that while you were alone in your dust with Evil as a name,
that somewhere,
in one of those prisons with the signs on the highway that warn you not to stop
the wickedest of the wicked
bathed in your words.
—did they turn those words cruel? or did you beat them to it? did they know your face? or
just your soul; would they kill you if they could? or would they maybe thank you
for the strange humanity you granted them—
As they smoked their cigarettes on the concrete and we went on thinking of them as dust,
were they burning your words too?
Or were they maybe beginning
to believe in somewhere again;
lost in your words,
these cold and endless
words
with the power to turn somewhere
into day
(By Avi Lohr ’24)