The distraction in the downstairs apartment
traversed rooms with precise concentration;
upstairs, it seemed like chaos–
so we crawled into bed &
turned the radio on &
spied on violent shadows
through the curtains
in the reflection on a picture window
of a different apartment &
felt in our longest bones,
the silencing of safety
like the noise of airplanes
dragged across the sky
during a slow
Los Angeles earthquake.
Val Dering Rojas is a Los Angeles based poet and artist who has also studied Addiction and Recovery Counseling and Psychology. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Dogzplot, Right Hand Pointing, Connotation Press, Arsenic Lobster and Pirene’s Fountain, among others. A multiple Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee, she is also the author of two chapbooks, TEN (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and Waspfish (Glass Lyre Press, 2016), which was a semi-finalist for the Glass Lyre Press 2016 Kithara Prize. When not writing, Rojas is usually obsessing over Austria vs. Amsterdam, aliens vs. angels, and her Dutch vs. German language apps, though Spanish really should be her concentration.
© 2018, Val Dering Rojas
Halfway Down the Stairs 