Instructions for Traveling West

inspired by Joy Sullivan

Tell the story of how you got here, even though it is a blur.

Road trips are mostly truck stops, large swaths of nothingness and weird motels.

Hearing ‘Modern Love’ in a grocery store in Tennessee and the deli guy not knowing who David Bowie was

There was the Walmart in Alabama where you saw your first rifle, a wall of guns behind a counter, like cigarettes

Smoking in the summer, the smell forming a sticky layer that clung to your skin in the humidity, the hot blacktop of parking lots.

why was i alway waiting in a parking lot? outside a store or a McDonald’s? i couldn’t name it then but now i realize it’s this unconscious knowing that i am not white and in the south and everyone telling me i look weird for a Mexican.

the relief of reaching California

the despair of reaching LA

the leather pants and velvet shirt our new landlord met us in.

“My name is Vaughn,” he said. “Like the grocery store.”

to a bunch of blank east coast faces that only knew what a shop rite was

the floors of my new bedroom covered in dust, cigarette ashes, looking like the surface of the moon, the distant skylight and no windows and the elevator that never worked when you went grocery shopping.