The Orange Alert

By Douglas Kearney Douglas Kearney

Picture the upturned millipede, dead,

and see the streets of Altadena:

palm tree rows against the concrete, stiff

to the horizon.

There have been no birds big enough,

we are comforted, to pluck

the chitins from before our yards

and vanish

into the sun like dog-fighting MiGs.

War bears litters of similes.

Altadena, smog hugs the foothills like mustard gas

where our rich peer through their blinds

into ravines, Santa Anas sway the mustard plants, yuccas

bob, some man—his cigarette,

a full gas-can, an itch. We’ve known

the orange alert, fires reaching for helicopters

like cartoon cats clawing at panicked birds.

Yesterday, fire engines and HAZMAT trucks

jostled at Alameda and El Molino

like beetles eating a four-legged spider.

That morning, radios warned of orange.

Neighborhood kids watched officers climb in

and out an open manhole,

consulting the entrails of the great dead millipede.

We watched the ground;

the sun hotter than all year.

The mountains hid Santa Anas,

the smog went orange with dusk, the growing shadows

of lingering birds.

Source: Fear Some (Red Hen Press, 2006)

Biography

Poet, performer, and librettist Douglas Kearney grew up in Altadena, California. He received his BA from Howard University and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and is also a graduate and fellow of Cave Canem.

In the Los Angeles Times, poet David St. John observed, “What Doug’s articulating is the fragmentation of the self and sensibility that you see prominently in T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land. He’s at the . . .

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