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This story is part of Image’s March Devotion issue, exploring various forms of reverence, love and worship.
In the days after the devastating fires in January, people around L.A., including poet Yesika Salgado, found stray pages from books on their doorsteps, yards, and sidewalks. We reached out to some of these people over Instagram, who kindly shared their photos with us, which are here accompanied by a specially commissioned poem by Salgado to commemorate our collective heartbreak.
Palms
for Los Angeles
when I call you mine, I mean that I belong to you. I mean, I can find you with my eyes closed. I can hum you into any room. wear you on my skin. get drunk off of your skies. I mean, I don’t know who I am without you. I mean, I don’t want to find out. when the fires got so hungry, they threatened to devour you whole, the ashes caked around my front steps. each one belonged to a sibling miles away, each my other half. twelve thousand of your structures leveled into embers and rubble. they all belonged to someone I needed to hold — a family of three sisters dancing in their living room, an elderly couple with drawings from their grandchildren on their refrigerator, a single mother fostering rescued puppies, a quiet bachelor and his sacred bookshelves — all suddenly stripped of everything. text messages reaching through smoke thick air. are you safe? are you safe? are you safe? oh, beautiful metropolis, we grieved you in howls, in desperate prayers, in panicked bargains with God, but where there is loss, there must be room for something new. this is when the hands arrived. thousands of them. saving. clearing. feeding. holding. giving. so many hands. an ocean of fingers. wiping. grasping. you’ve become a city of extended limbs. love compressed into the size of open palms. we who call you ours know the flames might have licked the edges of your skies but they couldn’t swallow our palms. we press love like prayer into each other. a promise lingers in the air,
we, twelve million hearts
devoted
to you.
