THE UNNAMED FIRE

by Alejandro Escudé

Dozens of beachfront homes in Malibu were destroyed overnight in the Palisades Fire on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025 (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

The hills were there, lichen green, and I felt the small 

ferocious animals scurrying inside of it. The coyote ever-present, 

ready to pounce on the owners’ three Shih Tzu. Sometimes, we’d 

housesit, and I’d lounge on the front yard overlooking the Pacific Ocean. 

It was as if I could dip a toe in the sea from that cliff, the ruffled white curve

as it wound north toward Malibu, an emerald land too close to call distant.

Now that street has turned ash gray, only the outlines of the lots remain,

that same coast like the edge of a puddle of spilled black ink. I recognize

the people who were caught in their cars, cars that were later plowed

to make way for fire engines and ambulances. The wind spoke in vowels

the night before last across my humble balcony that faces those smoky hills.

The sudden clanks. Buffering curtains. The canyons siphoning destruction.

One could imagine the homes as graves. Ash-people holding on to one another.

In ancient times no machine could whisk them away to safety. A volcano

of wind, torrent of melted metal. What powers do the digital towers have?

What future awaits those of us who traverse this playground of film and filth

and indifference, negotiating the enchanted brutality of this hardened city? 

One can read the scroll of the flames; they speak a crackling language,

letters made of embers. It rages on, the unnamed fire, it wraps itself 

in the gales. A migration begins along an avenue of burning palm fronds.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

A YEAR FOR WEATHER

by Terese Coe

The release of methane on a large scale has long worried scientists. The greenhouse gas is 20 times more damaging to the Earth over a 100-year period than CO2, and is even more potent in the short term. Should the deposits trapped within the Arctic escape into the air, it could kick off a highly destructive climate feedback loop: The methane would cause rapid warming, which would melt more of the Arctic, which would release more methane, which would cause more warming. --Moyers & Company, August 8, 2014

It’s been a year for weather.
Popocatepetl blew—
the cloud of ash dimmed Gretna Green,
Des Moines and Malibu.

In Black Hills, South Dakota, none
survived except the Sioux,
and Stinson Beach was starving but
for grazing caribou.

Spurts of lava blackened Shasta
and on Winnemucca Flats,
fiberoptic cables crackled,
vaporizing technocrats.

The system crashed, the networks fizzed
as if there’d been a purge
the night the blackout swept around
the world in the final surge.

Survivors took to houseboats,
a quake hit Pocatello,
LaBrea tar hit One-O-One
and buried Kate’s bordello.

The ooze has taken life and love,
last going for a fiver,
but fracking and the toxins meant
we lost the last survivor.


Terese Coe’s poems and translations have been published in Agenda (UK), New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, The Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among many other journals in the US, UK, and Ireland.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT A WOMAN WHO JUMPED OFF A CLIFF

by Luisa Villani

                                    poem pulled from Los Angeles local news, March 10, 2010


A live interview has a witness saw her “dangling”
from a tree outstretched from the sheer cliff-face
before she lost her grip.  Did she "jump”
or just merely "slide?"  The different news outlets
can't seem to agree on this point (her predicament),
nor on whether she was attacked by a rapist,
a would-be rapist, or an attacker. 
What is for sure:  she was on top of the cliff
and something happened, and when the paramedics
got to her, she was at the bottom of the cliff,
and the person who was with her at the top of the cliff,
or who confronted her at the top of the cliff,
or whom she encountered at the cliff top,
got away with her wedding band and her SUV (or her car).
How do you write about the woman, the cliff,
the other, the ocean, the sky's nothing embrace,
the woman above, the woman below?
How do you get it right?  Is there a "right"
when faced with loss, a right way to pick
between two losses, pick which one is greater,
which one is lesser, which one you'd rather lose?
If NPR says she "slid" and CBS says she "jumped"
who picked the right verb?  Sure, you can bicker
about the geography of Point Dume, its rocky face,
its sandy top, and you can guess the extent of her struggle,
the intent of his actions, but let's get one thing straight. 
There was a "him," and there was a "her," and in the long
history of him and her, how many times has SHE
actually had a choice?  And how many times has that choice
been between nothingness, and the horror of something?
Remember the days when she was told not to struggle,
to belay nothingness by submitting to something,
and then the later days when she was told
THAT was in fact wrong?  And if you want to forget
about the him and her, and return to the safe ground
of geography, the "just the facts M'am,”
let me ask you this (yes, there is also a me and a you here,
and you know you've already decided which one
you are), consider where you are right now,
if you’re running from this poem,
and if you really had a choice.


Luisa Villani is a former Wallis Annenberg Fellow at The University of Southern California, who currently resides in New Jersey.  She can't seem to land in the middle.