Marc Swan

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Where were you on that hot May day in L.A. when the SWAT team blasted the roof off the SLA?

Larry and Irene were with me
in a low rent flat in Eagle Rock
drinking can after sweaty can of ice
cold Coors, toking on
tightly rolled sinsemilla,
listening to Dylan and The Band
crank it out on track ten—
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
Three pairs of eyes wide
on a barricaded prize
on East 54th Street smoking
on a nineteen inch color TV.
Lobo beside us;
his paws curled under
his chin.
Through the split curtain
I could see smoke
fifteen miles away.
A flicker of sunlight
on the old green couch
seemed a slow tempo
version of the rapid fire
dance on the screen:
3722 rounds by six revolutionaries,
thousands more from the other side.
They didn’t get Patty Hearst.
I’m not even sure she was there,
but the house, its roof, walls, floors
anything living inside no longer was.

Quicksilver

Sound level is high
as are most of the patrons seated
along the bar. It’s a friend’s birthday
and we’re having pizza and beers
catching up on our evolving lives.
I tell him I try to write about current
events, but it’s quicksilver the way
life slips through my fingertips. Changes
from day to day, and sometimes less,
on decisions that will impact all of us.
We talk of the election and holding
onto our fragile democracy— the wars
and uncertainty on many fronts: Ukraine,
Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Taiwan
and the list goes on an on. A respite
when food arrives then talk shifts
to the slippery slope we climb craving
justice that never seems to arrive.

On Sunset Near Alvarado

It was a time
before the time when
mortgages and retirement plans
came to mind, a time of concerts,
film, ten dollar flights LA to SFO,
moving through each day knowing
there would be a tomorrow, a time
when life was easy, not many questions
just living alongside good friends
you could count on.
After a week of work and afterwork
bar hopping and changing partners
in a dance that never seemed to end,
we slid into Sundays at El Conquistador
around a wide wooden table reading
The LA Times, sopping up huevos rancheros,
drinking margaritas, and talking—
we talked about everything
and we listened, and then we sipped
espressos, and talked some more—
everyday problems dissipating like
summer rain on Sunset Boulevard.

Marc Swan lives in coastal Maine. Poems recently published in Gargoyle,
Nerve Cowboy Anthology, Glimpse, Crannóg, among others. His fifth collection,
all it would take, was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK).

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