I love her casual reach for cold silvery plates of film to capture the gangs of the city in
grainy daguerreotype.  Her lipstick never looks quite right, because she never wears it. She is one to herself, planted with the tripod in an unseasonable fur lined leather long-coat in leopard print, her red hair flying in the easy wind. Her lion’s mane of a sometime Rita Hayworth style rattles the gutters of El Gran Hotel Paraiso. It whips persistently like flame. Madeline mine, her eyes gut the chain-swinging graffiti guys into slices, those govoreeting goons in groups of threes—soulless thugs making mincemeat of the children on the street.  She shoots them from under the awning hidden beachside Escondido. 

                                                                    red delicious fruit
                                                                    is hanging by the doorway 
                                                                    serving boys on plates

She coaxes images slowly, wafting in like smoke, to a symphonic, rumbling Victrola of Señores Crosby, Diamond, and Dylan—who sings of red headed bathing beauties under parasols, and of the burning in the bottom of the soul found in poems from the 13th century. The ghosts of the boys’ victims came to reckon with them, leaving them infected with three incubi on spiritual reassignment to make throat cultures for a feast somewhere in the desert.  Perhaps to grow mushrooms for nearby brujos. You can see the horror in the daguerreotype, and what seems a ghastly tint overlaying each thug. Of course it wasn’t you. Of course you’re innocent. Of course you didn’t do it. No. Not you.

                                                                    mycelium blanched
                                                                    captured by ability
                                                                    memorialized