A Different Kind of Fire

Citric Acid reprints Lisa Alvarez's short prose poem, which appeared originally in Journal of the Plague Years. The piece is inspired by real-time reports and photographs shared by a former student from the site of a recent anti-Trump demonstration in downtown Los Angeles, including a peaceful freeway closure.

The young woman went alone. The journey required a bus, then an hour-long train ride from what people call the Inland Empire to the City. The City. Then a short walk from Union Station to the oldest street in the City, founded by people who came from the same country her parents had come from, but, when the City was founded, it was still that country, so they, the founders, most of them anyway, had really not come from anywhere but the land they were born in when El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles was founded in 1781. The plaza was also the site of raids nearly a century earlier, in 1931, the beginning of the forced expulsion of almost two million people. She had learned that and more in college. She learned that knowledge meant little unless you did something with it. And now she was there, there with others, born here, born there. She had made her sign the night before in her dorm room: “Ningun ser humano es illegal en tierra robada.” The crowd grew larger than the plaza and spread to the street. And then, moving as easily as winter rainwater finding its way back to a dry streambed, they took the freeway. She looked up. The familiar green signs of California freeways: 101 North: Hollywood Freeway. 110 South: San Pedro; 110 North: Pasadena. The sky was cloudless and blue. Palm trees waved. People cheered from the overpasses. Cars and trucks honked. There was singing. There was chanting. The police were somewhere far, far away with their blue and red lights, their sirens and bullhorns. More people than cars. Children too. And flags, so many flags, so many colors. Days earlier, the City had been on fire. People had come together, done what they could in the face of forces stronger than they were. This was a different kind of fire, she felt, a different kind of coming together. Below her, she saw the ribbed concrete, the broken white lane lines. She discovered that while she had started out alone, she no longer was. Neither was she afraid.

Photos by Summer Sanchez-Cornejo

Lisa Alvarez's debut fiction collection, Some Final Beauty and Other Stories, arrives in August from the University of Nevada Press. She is a poet and editor, and teaches writing at Irvine Valley College, where she co-directs its Puente Program.