For National Poetry Month 2020, we present the Poetry and prose from our Members.

Los Angeles, 2025
by Sarah Archer 

The car door parts for you like lips.
All night this vessel has sketched a silver web
over the contained chaos of L.A., taking fares like lovers.
You are not the only one this hour, or on this corner;
a queue of feet bisects the block,
each pair’s face lit by its hand’s cool, compartmentalized glow.

Each man to machine neatly assigned,
algorithmic fate, calculated invisibly in the emptiness above your heads,
triangulated in the stars.
Yours murmurs you down the street on a current and a spell.

The city is gussied up tonight:
the street signs slick and skinny, the all-night
donuts awning hot, tawdry pink. Bars wink
from the strings of unlit storefronts like gold
in a fortune teller’s bow of teeth.
A rare recent rain has slicked motor oil to the skin
of the asphalt.  It glimmers off the curves
of Melrose like the tips of cigarettes.
Each scene flames out in a frame.

And everywhere the cars are streaming, gliding,
they zip perfectly around parabolas as if magnetized to a track,
they are clean as needles, dazzling in their voltaic wills,
they are everyone’s and no one’s,
they conceal us.

It feels good to own nothing,
you are pure, sanitary, as empty as a reflection.
You leave nothing but air.

Sarah Archer’s first novel, The Plus One was published in July 2019, by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Follow Sarah on Twitter @SarahArcherM