If you don’t find God
on a freeway in Los Angeles,
you’ve never had a spiritual experience.
Remote qualification took place in
a multilevel “tri-sexual” club,
where anything goes,
with a nice, nasty dance floor for
vehement grinding
to pounding, loud industrial music.
Mommy and Daddy’s music.
Then, life in my 30’s, coming into Los Angeles,
with a Jeep was beach air and highway shimmer,
Church’s Chicken and taquerias,
cholos and señoritas eating
my wife’s white chili out the back,
with the biggest jalapeños
her buck could afford,
and pumping bass and popping screws
in the back, Arlo Guthrie mash-ups
with Ice Cube.
God gave her to me and God took her
away, although she said
the Source would take me first, and nothing,
nothing but this, nothing
but that I’m still most alive on asphalt spaghetti
where breezes blow from the West
and the ocean will boil,
the sun takes a skinny dip
and each nipple fizzles.
Manny Grimaldi is the author of Finding a Word to Describe You (Whiskey City Press 2025), Riding Shotgun with the Mothman (Boiled Egg Publications 2024), and the chapbook Ex Libris Ioannes Cerva (Boiled Egg 2024). He is co-founder and former managing editor of Yearling Poetry Journal. He resides in Louisville, Kentucky.
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