The Shortest Poem in America

Linda Collins

after Jaswinder Bolina

1. Everyone was Spanish and breakfast was a vast omelette with the chunkiest fries, broadest

mushrooms, slabs of bacon, fried tomatoes wide as an orange, oh, and the toast – mountains

of fat white bread with fancy grill marks, the bounty of butter across it like sunshine

on my first day in America.

I was flying through Los Angeles to England from home in New Zealand, tucked at the

bottom of the Pacific, with not many people, an apology of a nation, even the national flag

borrows from other countries, no star-spangled banner proclaiming how many states?

New Zealand is so small that it does not even have states. One America state

would gobble the whole country and ask for more cornbread.

Growing up, I had heard the West Side Story, I Like to Be in America,

on the radio,but that was not the story I understood. I was a Kiwi kid in a tract home in a

wisteria lane of no wisteria; our neighbours were Māori, tangata whenua, people of the land,

now diaspora in it, belonging to no tribe, nowhere, not even to their rental house next to ours,

and I was drawn to their words, their easy movement, ours so uptight white bread,

and I thought the song was, I Like to be in a Māori Car,

which I did, I liked to be in their backyard of car wrecks, to sneak by the trellis fence when

Mom was not looking (‘Don’t play with Them’), we the naughty children with our secrets,

scars, hunger and terror of grown-ups, would sit at the steering wheels and race each other.

all our little split-open lips laughing.

2. Why was everyone Spanish in America? Of course, they were not Spanish, I know now,

but Latinex. At the meet’ n greet at the airport, driving the van to the hotel, replenishing the

buffet, cleaning the rooms? It wasn’t the America I saw on TV, like I Love Lucy, though later

in life I found she was married to a Cuban.

Displaced, I was at home in transit in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to fly to London, to the

strange place where some ancestors are from. My hotel overlooked Sunset Boulevard, the

right place to die if you have broken dreams. Well, I had a broken heart – that first big love

story that wasn’t. I kissed a new soulmate, Bushmills, drank the whole bottle.

I thought, this is how young people are supposed to die, like you’re in an American movie,

drunk and glazing over, over to that Boulevard where stars bleed out on the pavement.

Next day, a housemaid found me, and the biggest heart in America saved me from a

short life. ‘Housekeeping,’ I heard her call, as I lay on the carpet. ‘Yes,’ was what got out,

and she came in, with the squeaking wheels of a trolley, rattling mops, buckets. A ‘what have

we here?’ and she held me like I imagine some mothers might.

My poem is too short a poem for such a big act. But while it is too

short, could it ever be big enough for her? For her familiar brown eyes, her outdoor skin, her

soft singing telling me not to lose myself? And the echo of neighbours who taught me how to

escape grown-ups, to drive cars with no motors, no wheels, ha-ha.