LA Hallucinations
Christine Larusso

“In the San Joaquin Valley, agricultural runoff from fertilizer and manure leaches into groundwater, contributing to some of the highest levels of nitrate pollution in community water systems in the country.

More than 85% of the town’s population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.”
—The Fresno Bee

“Buzzfeed, buzzards and TMZ crows
What can I say that you don't already know?”
—Carly Rae Jepsen

Freeway to freeway, fantasy
is a little tower you can build from the bones
you broke along the way. This stolen sorcery
has no name, but look real close into the kaleidoscope:
a patched-up vision of the West, a man with valise in hand,
a hike across nameless roads that cut through the city
until the cement turns loosely mineral and the condors show
up. It’s a story that makes me feel lonely without
the pressure of a party, its presence like a whole boulder
against my body. What if it included some vantage
from the vérité? The truth that a pair of palm trees caught
fire behind a supermarket in the Central Valley
thanks to the record-breaking heat that summer. Snap
your fingers and see: how inbetween choosing
oranges from broad baskets, most shoppers shift
their interpretation of impossible—fruit falls from the sky,
gold can be scraped from the floorboards.
We invent to the spectacle of opulence we create.
All circus, no bears.
My dreams devolve with each pill I take: muscles
unwinding like snakes on rocks, wet mud to satisfy
our thirst and other delusions of lush lives. Do you believe
in the oasis of your own mind, that the Golden State
is just as advertised, idyllic and untended
with wildflowers, nudes, lagoons? I mistake the leaflet
for lightning, for the promise of rain, noting that nothing
on the menu is measured and the soft part
of my skull works hard to shrink the known inches
between heads of romaine, fracking sites, incinerators.
Whether I like it or not, methane is the same
no matter its source. Right past all the fruits I peeled
to to line my path home, there’s the peach, the barrel
cactus holding the pistoled picture of the future: our remains
and memories replaced by facsimiles of suntans
and surfers, by a projection of Gidget bounding out
from the waves, eyes fixed on the firepit, careful
to step over the hot wire that warns of the border
where the public sand becomes private.

Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Colorado Review, the Los Angeles Times, Wildness, The Literary Review, Pleiades, Women's Studies Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prelude, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She is the 2017 winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, and has been named a finalist for both the Orlando Poetry Prize and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poem, "Lunar Understanding," was nominated for a Pushcart. She was a Producer for Rachel Zucker's podcast, Commonplace, and helped launch the Commonplace School. She currently lives in Los Angeles.