Altadena
Don’t you love to be strangled into submission by the city you live in?
Reclaim your sense of home among ashes
Everywhere I know is gone
I memorized those streets
The winding road to the best school I could find for my son
The steep incline of Lake Ave
The wildlife that’s with me that breathes the same air as the crunchy moms
Where I’ve deemed perfect enough to raise my son
Nothing as irreplaceable to me as the sun
Except this place
I told y’all it was pedazo de Aztlán
Pedazo de cambio
A city of fictitious design
Why?
My paradise was all mine
a los mexicanos a mi me los vas a respetar
Who else do you think is going to rebuild this city?
Who you are & what you make of it
Where you’re from & what you make of it
If I could just get a taste of it
That first time I stepped foot into the Altadena foothills
In high school
I must’ve been 16
Half of my life ago
& I used to go to Pasadena from the poverty-stricken part of El Monte
A 30-minute drive
For a single mother
For the Whole Foods
My mother had EBT
She gave me $100 a month for food from Whole Foods because I was hung up on being vegetarian
And I’m hungry now
For Altadena
For he giveth and he taketh away
I have very little left to say
Build me all the way up
And break me all the way down
We will rebuild it
Some say we shouldn’t
But this is our land now
Our honor
Fictitiously, forward, onward
A new future
A life still worth living
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