Electric Av

By Tom Laichas

From a living room, front door open wide, a neighbor plays an old corrido 
about an old war. It’s a song about the losing side. 

Summer lasts ninety-two days, its blue air tumbling sideways, bruising the 
bodies of parked cars.  

We’re here on a street named for wires strung atop the poles. The wires 
carry conversations. Some conversations are false, some true. The current 
alternates. True & false. False & true & false.  

That corrido, for instance. Once there really was a war. No one knows a 
thing about it. We take its lyrics on faith. This afternoon, that’s all there is: 
a song, a street, and a war fought in rhyme.

Tom Laichas’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rupture, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Stand, Ambit and elsewhere. He is recipient of the Nancy Hargrove Poetry Prize from Jabberwock Review and the author of Three Hundred Streets of Venice California (forthcoming from FutureCycle Press, 2023), Sixty-Three Photographs from the End of a War (3.1 Press, 2021), and Empire of Eden (The High Window Press, 2019).