When I found out, it was already too late. She was holed up at the Rosslyn with empty bottles strewn among her soiled things, or passed out in her SUV after pimping for another martini.

At one time she had more gleam in her cat eyes than all the girls in Pennsylvania. At one time, if you saw her move, saw her dance, hanging from a rope by her feet, you might abandon a mundane life and search for that glow.

They got her. Two DUIs on the Oregon coast in a week. They impounded her SUV, sentenced her to a year in a halfway house in rainy Seaside City. Demons hid under her umbrella, inside her rain-gear pockets and her rubber boots.

But she had enough sparkle left to bus some tables for coffee and coin, to invent stories on Facebook, to drink a pint on the Long Coast Beach only to have a rogue wave at high tide crash her party, render her temporarily lucid.

Never her fault, she said, “Life doesn’t like dancers for long.” That’s true enough, I admit. It was already too late when I found her last year, laid out in the Tenderloin, pints of empty gin bottles against a brackish day tent, a toothless guy with a knife slashing the air, screaming at her to wake up. “Bitch, wake up and make us some money!” he said.

Marcus Elman

is a yoga and fitness therapist working mostly with the elder-sage population in Southern California. He is curious about energy, how things work and get repaired, and the idea of redemption. His poem “The Boulevards of Los Angeles” received an honorable mention in Beyond Baroque’s 2017 annual poetry prize and was published in the textbook Method & Mystery: A Research-Based Guide to Teaching Poetry (The Poetry Salon, 2019). “The Crossing” was shortlisted for the Into The Void Poetry Prize 2020. His poems have been published in Cultural Daily [see links below], and in three volumes of Sunbeams: The Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Anthology (2018, 2019, and 2020). He is a graduate of American River College, UC Davis, and Pepperdine.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Marcus Elman: Two Poems in Cultural Daily (5 January 2023): “The Prosciutto Ambulance” and “The Offering”

⚡ The Boulevards of Los Angeles in Cultural Daily (26 September 2018)