STATE LINES
California Poetry
Desire. Poets make their way through the world bearing too much of it. I sometimes wonder if the source of this problem is that poets feel torn between their solitary, sedentary work and what life offers away from it: friendship, recreation, intimacy, etc. Vincent Guerra’s “Mobile Tanning Unit” directs us to the objects of his insatiable appetite. His first phrase, “I wanted,” is the poem’s engine, and the whimsical lines that follow read like an ode to physical freedom and eroticism without self-consciousness. I like that Guerra doesn’t torture himself here. Instead, he makes fun of his strong, simple desire to recline in the California sun, to “let go / in a pose of surrender.”
Mobile Tanning Unit
I wanted one of those hot muffins, guns or religion, where women in salmon blouses buy one get one free. Hints of genitals make life seem one big remember my genitals. A white couple in denim. The skin peels away from the madrones. They loaded 24-packs of soda onto the long boat. And crossed, the car-glittered lot like something Grecian. I wanted a single shot, a tall, small wake-up bomb. A muffin to level a hunger. A rapture. A pick-me-up. To let go in a pose of surrender, like a bather on Bikini Beach, when Hollywood Comes to You — let the fallout cloud pass. “Mobile Tanning Unit” from “When Hollywood Comes to You” (c) 2017 by Vincent Guerra. Appears with the permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved. Vincent Guerra was born and raised in Grass Valley, in Nevada County. “When Hollywood Comes to You” is his debut collection.
David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin LIT: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.