San Pedro Is the Mouth and Wilmington Is the Gut, But L.A. Eats

because the electric cattle prod turns anyone into a prolific storyteller

--Eduardo Galeano

Under the prod

and the tongue,

it’s necessary

and hard to create a culture.

Just ask any kid

whose parents

or grandparents

choose colorblindness,

ask any middle-aged

man without a buddy,

ask the sister cities,

San Pedro and Wilmington,

dangling alone together

as Los Angeles’ so-south

they won’t show up

on a tourist’s map

because it’s hard

to keep a miles-long strip

of poorly-policed,

gray-jurisdictioned

road in scale, and

nothing of import

to you is at the end

of that slim highway

meeting the sea.

But that road is the straw and the prod,

soaking up port-wealth from Wilmington as San Pedro,

gaping to let more ships in while both create their own mythologies

and eye-level beefs with each other and never look up or north.

It’s hard to create a culture if you take to heart the words: “Don’t be smart with me” instead of

seeing that the phrase means: don’t get litigious or linguistic; instead, take the prod and hope for

reality, which only occurs on TV in a house rented from the rich, surrounded by

strangers who have nothing to offer but their own broken tongues and makeshift prods.