Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
The following poem, “To Tell the Literal Truth” by Steve Kowit was published in Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, City Works Press’s inaugural anthology.
To Tell the Literal Truth
is the trick by which poetry, Rico was saying, anchors itself
to the actual world (I had been rash enough to suggest
that in art the literal truth doesn't matter a bit),
when a coiled rattler, a good four feet of her, stretched
in the heat on the ill-marked Moorfred Rivercrest trail
we'd been hiking, startled us out of our chatter.
We didn't breathe, gave her a wide berth, & were safely past,
when Zoly, our Aussie companion, who'd just gotten back
from a month-long dig in the outback pits of Rodinga
—Zoly, who cares not a whit for epistemological theory—
did something I'll never forget: in one swift motion swiveled,
bent & grabbed for her throat, the other hand closing
above that whiplash of rattles, then, with a grin, rose to his feet.
The creature writhed in his hands, buzzed with her hideous
rattlers, while she hissed with her godawful tongues
& tried to break free. Rico & me, we jumped back in terror.
Zoly, holding her out for us to admire, said "Crotalus atrox:
Western Diamondback. Marvelous specimen, no?"
I could care less what it was called. I took another step back.
Zoly strode to an outcrop of boulders a few yards away,
& gently as setting a kid in its crib, & with only the tiniest
flourish—the sort a jaunty conductor or close-up
magician might make—tossed the thing free.
It vanished, instantaneously, slithering into the rocks.
I took a deep breath & relaxed. From where we stood,
on that rise, you could make out the Salton Sea, far
to the east, & the undulant floor of the desert a long drop below,
endless & dreamlike. "Amazing!" Rico mumbled
under his breath, lifting his Padres cap & rubbing the sweat
from his brow. But whether he meant the vista, or snake,
or how quickly it vanished, or what Zoly had done,
or the whole delectable drift of the thing, god only knows.
Listen: In art, the truth—in that sense—doesn't matter.
I made the whole story up. The Aussie. The outback.
The snake. Even the name of the trail. All but the part
where two friends & I argue over the poet's relationship
to the literal fact. Everything else in this poem is a lie.
—Steve Kowit from: Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (San Diego City Works Press, 2005)