Anaphora for Around Here

Posted on June 28, 2006 in Poems The Orange

• Around here, you see women in their fifties whose skin (but not their eyes) looks like they are in their seventies because they spent their twenties burning themselves for beauty’s sake under Huntington Beach’s sun.
• Around here, you see many Asians who take part in the cries to keep Mexicans from flooding over the border for fear that they will be chosen by the wrathful instead.
• Around here, foreigners from the same country greet and hug each other even though they do not remember each other’s name.
• Around here, we have rain clouds and wind that never drip or storm.
• Around here, the light flattens its subjects like a telephoto lens.
• Around here, I hunch my shoulders and rub my parched ears.
• Around here, the sprinklers come on unpredictably.
• Around here, the newly wetted mud cracks.
• Around here, thunderheads lean against the Saddleback, dousing only the high ridges.
• Around here, there is heat and dryness as in the loins of the fiftyish women who shouldn’t have let themselves get a tan.