Based on a true story

A blackout opens city-wide eyes. 

In Echo Park, a man breathes panic, 

lost on his walk home 

as emergency dispatchers 

brew their teas under the artillery 

of voices phoning in

about a strange glowing cloud:

The Milky Way’s detonated stars

drop onto Sunset Boulevard, disarming 

the Hollywood glare bomb.

Three zip codes away

before their apartment window, 

the man’s family 

gape at this shock in the sky

draped across a concrete sprawl. 

Zoom in. The man, still trying 

to get back to his bedroom, 

slips on an unlit sidewalk. 

Darkness watches him

flattened 

under our galactic thumbprint

blazing down 

on the neighborhood of his birth.