Libby Cudmore

L.A. NOCTURNE

It’s 2 AM & we’re coffee-drunk in a Waffle House off the highway that cuts across Alabama like an old scar. We eat heartburn rib-eyes on blood-soaked toast as our waitress gives us someone’s else’s check. You pay the cost. You don’t correct an Alabama woman no matter how wrong she is.

You crack open another biscuit, watch me eat with eyes like Katrina streets. Los Angeles is a long way behind us & old names are buried among ashes of torched c-notes & cheap luggage. Your hand is a grenade; you delete your partner’s phone number from your speed-dial.

We borrow a motel room from The Joker, who wears sunglasses indoors & buys the lie that we’re newlyweds. Shotgun wedding, I think, remembering the sounds of bullets. Our life together will always be an alternate history.

You take your gun to the bathroom. I panic every time you close a door, wondering if I will hear a flush or a bang. You stare out the window when you think I’m asleep. You, my love, will sleep when you’re dead.


Libby's YouTube video reading of "L.A. Nocturne" coming soon


Libby confesses: "I went through a brief period of writing TV-inspired prose poems that vanished as quickly as it came on.This is my favorite of the three that I wrote about my favorite show, THE SHIELD, as a sort of imagining of what Shane Vendrell's life would be if he had gotten out of LA. But Shane's just the allegory; I think all of us are on the run from something at some point in our lives."

LIBBY CUDMORE is the author of THE BIG REWIND (William Morrow 2016) and the Martin Wade PI series in ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Her stories have been published in BLEED ERROR, ORCA, MONKEYBICYCLE, HAD, RECKON REVIEW, THE NORMAL SCHOOL and SMOKELONG QUARTERLY. She is the 2018 recipient of the Oregon Writer's Colony Prize, a current Anthony and Shamus award nominee and a four-year alumnae of the Barrelhouse Writer's Camp.