I don’t worry about my body anymore, since time has proven it so useless, faulty as a map of Los Angeles. But my home’s north of there–the malleable brain to California’s stiffening body. Even in my hometown, I need a map to manage the city streets that moonlight as snapping synapses and the asphalt, that grey matter, that buzzes with the electricity of knowing and feeling. It’s no wonder the street lights flicker.

But back to Los Angeles, where my brother holds the rounded square of his daughter’s head, which is even softer than this city. He’s reaching past the ‘wet cement’ sign to press his handprint there, so he can read that lifeline like a poem every time she speaks. Every time she speaks. Every time she speaks, she will speak poetry. And if hearts and brains are cities, then all metropolises beat and surge and writhe. And all the vandalism in those cities is no less poetry than my brother’s cooling palms. And if his daughter is a poem, then we are all authoring our own anthologies. We are all our own masters and we are all our own masterpieces.