Hillsdale Boulevard by David Starkey

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Hillsdale Boulevard

Sun’s scorched the front lawns

on the busy street where I grew up

and where once the aspiring lower-

middle class lavished sprinkler water

on their carpets of green. It was home

for milkmen, mechanics at McClellan,

truck drivers, unsuccessful salesmen

and public school teachers like my parents

who found it fitting to live

in their students’ neighborhood—

though even then there were rumors

of rapes and beatings in the warren

of apartments and rental houses

lurking behind our tidy backyard.

I remember the pithy taste of orange-red

pyracantha berries, and my sister

poking her finger at the red hourglass

on a black widow’s belly, screaming,

though it hadn’t bitten her. In fact,

nothing very bad happened to us.

We moved away before the Air Force Base

shut down and real gangs took the streets.

Still, the ancient Greeks were right

to devote entire literatures to nostos,

and sometimes on autumn mornings

I’ll drive slowly down the boulevard

to see the broken glass in the median,

fences tilting against sickly oleanders,

front yards blanketed with the swollen

purple fruit of the unkillable olive trees.

Featured Art: "Kennebunk" by Michaela Savell

David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. He is Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, Co-editor of The California Review of Books, and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty-five years, he has published eleven full-length collections of poetry with small presses—most recently Dance, You Monster, to My Song Song and What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency—and more than 500 poems in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. His textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief is in its fourth edition.

Michaela Savell is a Salem-based mixed media artist. She is drawn to faces and architecture because of they challenge her to capture complex emotions in simple stokes of a brush. Even in the crevices of an alley or a small streak of light around a corner, Michaela sees beauty.