Los Angeles Bicycle Poetry (The Velodrome Poems)
I love a good bike path and the Los Angeles bike path along La Ballina Creek and down to the ocean is my favorite. I have loved bicycles since my very first red bicycle that I tore around our neighborhood in Maryland, but I’m not fast and I don’t train or race like my husband. The one and only time I biked at a velodrome was absolutely exhilarating and terrifying.
Velodrome bicycles are different. There aren’t any brakes on them. I know there are other differences but that’s the most important because you can’t just brake and hop off the bike. A velodrome bike is more like an animal in my opinion and the velodrome itself is a big track in an oval bowl, meaning the inside lane is actually at the bottom of what looks and feels like a very steep grade. Velodrome biking (when you watch people who are good at it) is one of the most beautiful, graceful, muscular and intense sports I’ve seen, blurry legs and core low over the bike like a jockey on a horse.
A velodrome bicycle is more like an animal than a machine in my opinion and is less predictable than a beach cruiser or road bike.
A spotted orchid is to spotted moth as velo bike is to horse.
Biking down to the beach in Los Angeles 2023. Growing up we went to the Jersey shore almost every summer and the water was warmer and the beach (back then, it’s not like this now) had more litter. I remember seeing several bleached out Tab diet soda cans in the sand which feels now like saying you used to vacation at an archeological dig.
Writing the draft and it just kept going and going and going.
The wheels spinning kept up through the poem draft with one thing leading to the next which ended up several pages long and very unwieldy. I thought I would cut out everything I didn’t like and/or that didn’t seem to make any sense and see what was left.
I don’t mind posting unfinished work unless I’m actually working on it in or plan on coming back to it, but I think this is pretty much scraps, in which case it goes into a digital file folder called scraps and twenty years from now I might re-use it but I don’t feel particularly precious about it.
The Velodrome Poem
World’s tallest building, was it? If I threw a penny from it? Velocity
from the word velo meaning to cover: the face with a veil
the land on two wheels,
velodrome, etcetera.
First we learn the rules of the track but I want nothing to do with fatality
prevention; it’s grief enough when I restock the crash cart at work
where our prayer is a deep press against a poor, frozen heart.
All the evil I grew up with pretty much forgotten.
Evil gets a pass.
All evil lined up
for the bathroom.
Will a penny fall from the top of that building and crack black lines
in the pavement? No, because of the troposphere also the wind
at the base of the building lifting up as if in prayer. O, sidewalk.
Empire State twice as high as Khufu’s last resting place. Secret
chamber. Locked up garden. O, archeologist.
If amygdala are the size of candied almonds what then?
I fell down the steep spiral staircase reserved for servants; I used
to run over the low pitched roof of the ice house in New Jersey
I knew not to go inside that low room even with the permanent wood
ladder. Our mothers showed us Perry’s cap still hanging
in the kitchen but we kids came along too late
and never met him.
This is the truth for once in my life: what made me angry was nothing
in particular. At work someone heard I was having a baby; I wasn’t.
I voted against.
Note that.
After the wedding I wanted to take your bones and hold them up,
show you how in an earthquake you’d need an exoskeleton
of concrete or wood.
What do magazines know? They want us curled like cats around
our symptoms when really the trouble has nothing to do
with a little fatigue or indigestion the real trouble
in my own head. If the amygdala are the size of
jordan almonds
what then?
If you describe shame there is a bloom quality to it, how it pushes hot
against the top of the throat for some, as if the tide came in
and the ocean is your own blood coming up to the brain
the way the sea comes up on the sand
to take something
back.
What I wanted was red lipstick and lips with no little dry lines, a face
without craquelure but couldn’t swallow another
online makeup tutorial but I loved you last year and I love you still
even if you are not what I thought, you are much, much
better, more distinct, but with more metal
brackets.
When I was a girl the hair on the back of my neck
caught fire when I flushed angry.
My boyfriend refused to go further and found someone who hung
on his every word, which is the start of love,
that pyramid rising from the dust, with its little chamber for the old king,
his tomb rough-hewn, original sarcophagus sunken in the river,
purportedly. Upstairs in her chamber the queen,
equally dry,
black quartz
preserved by the thousands toiling across whatever the surface of Giza
had become with all that work.
and who can blame her, or him, or any of us, sitting in our salt baths,
meaning in sorrow,
sitting in a bath full of cry-water
meaning also, actual magnesium salt crystals, after a long session at the track,
legs quivering with the whoosh of the asphalt beneath smooth wheels,
rippling the water in the bath mixed with herbs
to help the quadricep muscles relax.
