Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: Poetry concerned with place is almost always, at some level, about both the self and the community, and the interplay between the two. As a twentysomething in suburban DC, missing the flat fields of the Midwest, I read Larry Levis’s concept of the lost Eden in a collection of his essays, an idea that helped redefine my homesickness: “Place in poetry, then, or for that matter in much fiction, is often spiritual, and yet it is important to note that this spiritual location clarifies itself and becomes valuable only through one’s absence from it. Eden becomes truly valuable only after a fall, after an exile that changes it, irrecoverably, from what it once was.” I thought about this irony, a place becoming more valuable once we lose it, as I read Steven Espada Dawson’s sonnet set in the Los Angeles area, a masterful poem that moves by association, even as it forms a complex, compelling scene.
To hear Steven read the poem, click below:
Homesick Sonnet
Three blocks east a wrecking ball wears the dust
of your old house. Red wallpaper like blush across its cheeks.
It smiles because it must. The Library Tower is a broomstick
Mom pretends to bang on God’s floorboards. He went for tortas
and left the stereo on. Three blocks west a woman you know
is shot while eating breakfast. The rattled cop missed his mark,
feels himself unlucky. The chilaquiles still softening
in her gut. In Boyle Heights you’re still young. You fill found
condoms with hose water your neighbor calls city punch.
Those ribbed bladders made from Magnums, too tough
for water fights. Every balloon is a gun. A gunshot, unmistakably
loud. Your brother jokes—what kinds of apples grow on trees?
All of them, stupid. What sounds follow you away
from home? All of them. You’re always leaving.
Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles and lives in Austin, Texas. He is the son of a Mexican immigrant, and a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. His recent poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Ninth Letter, Poetry, Split Lip, and Waxwing.
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