I met a number of talented poets among my fellow students at UCLA in the early 2000s, but one of them really had it—to spare. Athena went on to the Iowa Workshop, but now practices law. The poem below appeared in the defunct POOL in 2007. If I were compiling an LA anthology…
@BorisDralyuk “his face making the word scrofula” is not something I’m going to easily forget while I chew Btw I had the weird, humbling experience of loving a book about Moscow recently and then realizing its author was a college friend I used to brush off
@BorisDralyuk I tended bar just down the street and often ended up there at 2a.m. - years before this was written - but time didn't change the place. This poem nails it.
@BorisDralyuk Love the temporal slippages in this LA crime scene poem. POOL was a landing place for post-avant poetries, and this fits the bill.
@BorisDralyuk We must have just missed each other
@BorisDralyuk It is lovely when poetry is recognized for its wondrous qualities in circumstances like this. The poetry "circles" can become quite hermetic. More than one poet/lawyer or lawyer/poet out there! 😸