"California" by Cynthia Cruz

My friend Billy dressed as a boy.
She cut her long blonde hair off

So that her father would stop
Always touching her.

Night is when death and his daughters arrive.

She stood in the dark
On the side of the Imperial

Highway waiting for anyone
Who would take her.

We lived in the Blue House

In an abandoned car wash.

All of us, orphans and fucked
Feral children.

Most of us are dead now and
Cannot speak.

Nights, we inebriated and melted
Into the concrete floor of the Blue House.

Heaven was a sexless
Slumber party.

In the mornings we'd lose Germ,
The beautiful fifteen-year-old.

Outside the makeshift hospital,
He sold himself

For H. Do whatever it takes
To kill the breathing

Memory animals. We stayed
At the Blue House

Listening to Bowie's Heroes
In German. And watched the same movie

Over and over. The one about the thirteen-year-old
Junkie turned prostitute

In platforms and electrifying glamor
On Kurfürstenstrasse. And how we loved the White

Duke, living on warm milk and cocaine. Help me,
Billy said,

Her face a fixed mask
Of secret terror.

What her father did to her
In the night--

Help me, she said.
And we never did.




One thing that struck me about this poem was the juxtaposition of adult activities and a childlike way of communicating. It begins in the second stanza with the awkward inclusion of the word "always" to describe how Billy's dad touches her and continues towards the end when the speaker talks about watching a movie about a junkie prostitute "over and over."