In midsummer, in Los Angeles,
the night is fractured
with mountains, grilling ink
into the blue thaw. I trail

into pools and pastures,
and in the diner,

tattoos speck
and skirt up booths,

the waitress, Dottie, is whipping
shells, mac and cheese,

waffles and chickens,
all oracles in the oil.

You think I'm kidding? Look
at Hopper's orange rooms,

his lone man. Vineyards
are boring to paint,

the coffee rumbling us all
into a primal scene, the mismatched

silverware like guns in a Western,
all the possibilities

of a warm night.

anyone can walk through
the door. The drunk drive, the

open-air and clipping down
Highland Avenue. Here are all the streets

I remember: Alvarado and Effie.
Mohawk and Montana. Before

all this? The hills of Carpinteria,
cattle punk, the drained floodplains

and eucharistic jimson weed.
But dig that ditch city,

those impersonal stones,
the great vigilance

of the 19th century,
the circus of eggs on the plate,

Dottie full of lips, just lips
sipping, stinging the sandy air.


About this poem
"'The Jungle' is about a brief time when I was living in Echo Park and exploring the different cinematic landscapes of Los Angeles. Being from the East Coast, I had a really visceral reaction to the space of that city, most significantly, the kind of kitsch imagery, the overwhelming highway infrastructure, a particular type of loneliness and anonymity. I was reading a lot of O'Hara while there, and I think there was something productive about reading about New York City while living in L.A. O'Hara was always trying to make saints of celebrities, holy imagery of the everyday street scenes, mythologize instead of thwart the stereotypes of an urban space, and I think I was influenced in that way, thinking about the oracles of fried food, the primal scenes of a diner, the Eucharistic weeds."
-Megan Fernandes

About Megan Fernandes
Megan Fernandes is the author of "The Kingdom and After" (Tightrope Books, 2015). She is an assistant professor of English at Lafayette College and lives in New York City.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Megan Fernandes. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate