Issue 5 • Spring 2003 • Poetry

soundtrack for home movie no. 29

Lisa Asagi

We have been in Walmart for nearly an hour. Standing in the fabrics section after taking the slow extended family tour of the other departments, sensation of a thin piece of plastic being inserted just under my heart. Draining blood into an invisible machine beneath the blank linoleum landmass. There are no windows in this structure. Only automatic sliding doors. We are surrounded by new objects covered with dust. Overstock. Overstock. My grandma says she doesn't like the smell in here, wanting to go outside for a cigarette but stranded by the absence of exit signs. She points to a plastic vine of wisteria and mouths the word pretty. I cannot put my finger on it. How this place and all that is like it feels like a hospital. She knows this smell. While we wait outside near the garden department, a man wheels in a huge cardboard box and tells the security guard that it won't fit through the door of his house.

The storm announced during the college basketball game is in the third stage of emotional breakdown. It is in denial but here come the tears. At 12:25 AM it is a slow and sparse cry. Someone walking through an empty parking lot. Not yet overcome by having to finally let go. One more time.

On nights like these.

On nights like these I take all of my cards and fan them out on the table. On each card is a depiction of an option. Each option is a door that exists that can be walked through. The object of this exercise is not to pick any one card. It is to keep opening all of the doors.

Outside, the rain still has not come. It has stalled. At this moment, somewhere in this world, someone is crying in a car, all the windows rolled up.

Somewhere in this world, someone is leaving the car behind and walking home.

Somewhere in this world, someone is sitting in hours of silence, watching the windshield replay a long forgotten scene.

As the rest of the world makes its way through another Monday.

Lisa Asagi is the author of two foldout chapbooks Physics and Twelve Scenes From 12 A.M. designed by artist Gaye Chan and published by Tinfish Press. Throughout the month of March 2003, a project of reworked and remodeled found books created in collaboration with fellow writers Justin Chin and R. Zamora Linmark called Book2, commissioned by the Potrero Nuevo Fund, will be on exhibit at the Youth Speaks Library & Reading Room in San Francisco.

Go To: Issue 5 or Lodestar Quarterly home page