Why Are There So Few Cacti in Movies About LA?
I walk around and see succulents
in every shape and shade of green:
twelve-foot cacti that look like
they jumped out of a Loony Tunes desert.
ones that resemble squiggly-haired
aloe plants or sage-colored phalluses with tongues
sticking out like the Rolling Stones logo.
I pass bushes full
of drooping birds of paradise, a fat rabbit
in a cage, orange trees with oversized green globes.
On Waterloo, I snap a picture
of a discarded terrarium
with a little sand and
a limestone Mayan lintel inside.
It’s funny that the verb is still snap,
since now almost all of our photographs
are created by our silent cells.
At the Sunset Boulevard farmers’ market,
a woman in a lavender hijab selling hipster baseball caps
borrows a generator from the grain free nan vendor
so I can charge my phone.
We talk about cheap airfare.
I tell her stay in another state
if she wants to visit New York.
Cheap Therapy
Breathe in warbler songs.
Breathe out subway growling.
Leave a fuchsia lip print on the border
between the living and the dead.
Skinny-dip in iced gin.
Listen to the listless.
Unfriend your frenemy.
Replace your heart with a child’s drawing of a heart.
Build a snowman out of your ex’s snowjob.
String a tightrope between your hope and your fear.
Make someone else walk across it.
Start a mental collection of other people’s physical collections.
Give away your middle name.
Say welcome to the elk sleeping on your chest.
Say goodbye to the person you almost were.
Replace the lightbulb with the moon.
Be kind to your inner child as she tries
to understand mortgage rates.
Sweep the dust bunnies off your bunny figurine.
Temper the intemperate.
Practice forming and unforming your ugliest frown.
Punch a self-portrait-shaped hole
in the space-time continuum.
Pet the cat that escaped from last night’s dream.
Kiss the forehead of your pet peeve.
Trade in your trademarked catchphrase.
Spread dark chocolate on the void.
Sleep.
Joanna Fuhrman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press) and To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021). In 2022, she became a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press.