try to live

by E.W. Sparks

Without home or homing

It isn’t possible.

To this day, every patch of green in Los Angeles is a waiting bed and I stare hard for signs of habitation by the stolen carts of department stores

Occupied.  

So many occupied stretches between the corners and underpasses.  It defies definitions of home by breaking the city open as a shared dwelling.  Los Angeles is comfortable and safe for those who can see it, feel it, and wear it

Comfortable in its own discarded carts dotting tent cities and parking garages.  

So build it yourself – 

The safety and rooms

Take those hands and use driftwood and wet mud and measure twice.

Arrange the moment of home with care and purpose and try to remember –

The asking for help from a rolled down window. 

E. W. Sparks is a graduate of the UCSD writer’s graduate program, a graduate of the USC Rossier School of Education, and a public school teacher practicing inclusive and activist methodologies of teaching.  They are a father of five, a published poet and musician, and a survivor of homelessness spanning the cityscapes of Los Angeles, CA, Cleveland, OH, and Phoenix, AZ.  Their writing focuses on the human diasporic moment of separation from safety in personal and collective apocalypses, on the injection of love as decolonizing affect into education, and on the personal growth that surviving traumas inspires.