Beachwood left its indelible imprint on me. My first memory of America. , I was baptized in the amniotic fluid of this strange landscape, and the land itself became embossed into my unconscious, its rifts and folds assembling along with my learned sense of object permanence.  My consciousness was so malleable that even now, I swear- a distant innocence reverberates through the body of this land. Like a plagiarizing echo, Beachwood has become a reassembly. My singular memory. My own pocket of America.

Now, the wild familiar of her Canyon greets me as a woman. An equal, a friend. She is beautiful,  as she has no obligation to be beautiful. She is not ambitious, but she is monumental, mountainous.  She is prone to contradictions, seismic contractions and strange coincidences. I tread delicately on her bruised backbone. I am careful with her. She has almost been seized into submission, beneath a sequined stretch of houses whose impatient occupants never bothered to learn her secrets.

The sculptures on Winans, the secret Garden of Oz on Ledgewood, her decaying Temples that housed monks and madmen whom constructed Tesla coils and tried to speak to God. The unspoken legacies of those who have found and lost their minds in the curtains of her canyon.

Beachwood is no backdrop. She goes through people, under them, into them. Her arching spine acts as an equator between the human and the animal, prey and predator, the desired and the dismissed. I study her secret arteries, private groves, trace her long legs across invisible thresholds. Her wild eyes, the sailing hawks. Her heated thoughts, the blue swallows that pivot and rotate through the nape of Wolfs Lairs trail. Her ridges ache with me. Her open mouth, parting at the bronson caves, brushes the city streets smooth with her canyon tongue, swallowing the brutality of traffic.

At dusk, her cotton-candy halos anoint the sky, she gives way to a thick, dilated violet night. Blue treestops recede under the ripe pillows and ridges of her open thighs, as she muffles the whirring of Wi-Fi, as if her body is a barricade, guiding you to sleep under her body. She stays watching, warm, wet and awake.  Intermittently unsettled by an orchestra of birds and insects, buzzing, twinkling, twitching, and never completely silent.