Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

San Diego, 1965  
Dorianne Laux

When I turn 13, the world population reaches 3.3 billion.
I can’t know that in my cul de sac, my yard fenced
in 2000 year old redwood slats. I know nothing
of our place in the galaxy, little of my species,
except that we are persistent, generous, neglected.
I know this from my sisters and brothers, the way
they soldier on in the face of my father’s rage,
their bare spines steadfast beneath his belt, by how
they pull their T-shirts back over their heads
and walk away, a pride of lions lugging
their bikes out onto the street. Russia suffers
another crop failure but I don’t know this
as I eat my Cherrios before we walk to the movies
and pay a dollar each to see Dr. Zhivago.
I fall in love with Julie Christie
and Omar Sharif, the girl on the dam
holding her balalaika. I don’t know why
everyone is fighting, but I’m on the side of the poet.
I go home and make pencil sketches
of Rita Tushingham in her boiler suit
and Wellingtons, her bangs swept to one side
beneath her babushka. I draw Cher
in her bell bottoms with hair-thin lines,
shade in the folds at her elbows and knees.
I see something on the TV about Watts
and Selma, Malcolm X, but no one black
lives in our block of pre-fab Navy houses,
the lawns dotted with dandelions
that after years of mowing have learned
to grow shorter stems, so there’s no one
to deny or betray except each other and ourselves.
I like Andy Warhol’s Campell’s soup can
because we open them for dinner, the lid
peeling away under the greased gears
and beveled blade. The Beatles are singing
Yesterday and I won’t remember anything
about my foster brother shooting himself
in the foot. I cannot imagine 3.3 billion people
living on the earth and I can’t help even
one of them. Kevlar is about to be invented
by a woman named Stephanie Louise Kwoleck
which will keep my older brother alive
during his parachute dives into the jungles
of Vietnam. She has my middle name
and her invention will protect him so he can
return undamaged, unscathed.