The Monsters are Due on Vine Street- Samantha Lucero

of a grin usually on the missing
persons board at truck stops
where famished men would pick up hitch-hiking
girl-children run aways, escaping home
to find themselves, smelling like
violins in the attic
here she is in red-hot-red,
rose-red, blood-red, a portrait streak of
glitter high-heels with no hosiery
ankles with tattoos of talaria wings
and a wink at an invisible camera

she’s such a gem, such a picture
on the side of the road on her back
holding out her upturned palms to catch the diving
heavy rain, collecting it inside of the sinkhole
of her open mouth,
crooked THERE, like a tangled doll.

do you see that glorious photograph
of her alive, when she felt so dead
and here she is getting the flashing
lights she craved, licking the gravel
on sunset boulevard, dead as the moon
only bright because the camera catches
the last expression that her face made before
she fell into that uncanny embrace
of unknowable death, where the eyes, wide like wax
stare out into another, unseen place
blind to where everyone else remains now
because she’s escaped and found herself

who killed—— ?

the best psychics in venice beach
say his name was ——.

---

Samantha Lucero likes… uhhh… cats, and can never think of what to say about herself, she writes at sixredseeds, sometimes and is a managing editor at the Sudden Denouement Literary Collective.