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With My Bathrobe and Bottlebrush
I’ve ordered a bathrobe of golden- crowned sparrow feathers, the soft down from the belly. Back ordered, the claws that catch. I plan to scale the trunk of the bottlebrush shrub in the yard and shelter memories of our marriage there. First, I want to fly, drift through that cumulus fluffing itself in the blue. Bend and flash my teeth against the white curlicues, dive through those clouds with the silver-plated linings everybody talks about, and land on my feet back on dirt where I’ll see the veins of my hand in the veins of leaves. I’ll stuff the pockets of my robe with those leaves, bring them to the library and press them in the encyclopedia of the world with its foxed, mildewed answers. The damp catching in my throat, I’ll cough up mulch to rake around the bottlebrush to save it from winter’s freeze. When my sparrow crampons arrive I’ll be ready to climb into the bower of branches, red stamens awakening in me washing and washing those baby bottles that held my breast milk while I went to work. |
Cathryn Shea is a fourth-generation Californian, having grown up and lived in northern California most of her life. While poetry is her main interest, Cathryn had a day job many years in the computer industry in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. She also served as editor for Marin Poetry Center Anthology. Cathryn’s chapbook, Snap Bean, was released in 2014 by CC.Marimbo of Berkeley. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in After the Pause, Gargoyle, Gravel, Main Street Rag, Permafrost, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Cathryn lives in Fairfax, CA, and spends part of each day watching over a covey of California quail. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea.
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Ocean Ambassador, Sylvia Earle
—1979 Jim Suit Descent Ten years after Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked a new world above, Sylvia Earle descended 1250 feet to the ocean floor. She wore a pressurized fiberglass suit, tethered to a submersible only by a communication line. Off the island of Oahu twelve-foot corals grew, lit up in blue bioluminescence when touched, like streetlamps at dusk, lighting one after another. Orange, yellow, blue, and red crabs hung from the coral like laundry. Above, sun’s faint glow still visible, sea worms burrowed in sand beneath her feet and eels wrapped around the coral’s base. Earle explored at a depth where no human had ever been. Look up at the sky's moon and think Armstrong, Aldrin. Think Earle when you see the ocean, imagine its depths -- a no man's land where a woman was first. |
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Inscription
A portrait of dawn hung in the sky. The seagull-calls became my blush – bruises like plumage. Then I renamed you: the growth of pampas grass among the dunes. The dunes took the shape of your mourning. I could no longer hear their movements, nor was the wind persuaded to carry our voices. The heavy ocean, doubled in its mirror, turned our memories into sand – rewrote them all in its silver words. At night, we touched the clams, asked some of them to open. |
Kimberly Kralowec holds a degree in English from Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she received the F.S. Jennings Memorial Writing Prize. Her work has previously appeared in Poetry Midwest, and her chapbook manuscript, Currence, is seeking a publisher. She lives in San Francisco, where she works as a lawyer and writes the blog anapoetics.com.
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Son
Before he can understand, there is a song she whispers, something like the sea, an echo of something from before -- before he arrived and was awash in newness. She sings and hums her song, her smell, and then he begins to notice the light the other smells: coffee, lipstick, the other languages, and he learns each thing by heart. She begins to speak to him in the new way, one round word at a time released between her lips and tongue, and he begins to make her sounds, the sounds of the sea they are swimming in, and now there is nothing private between them; this is everyone’s language, the language of the world; he wears his new shoes and likes them; he goes away and she cannot follow, and when he returns he tells her in the language of the world what happened there. He listens to music she has never heard, eats food she has never cooked. Finally he buys a suit and a ticket to Bogota, sends her a post card from another world. |
Gail Rudd Entrekin has taught poetry and English literature at California colleges for 25 years. Her books of poems are: The Art of Healing (with Charles Entrekin) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2016), Rearrangement of the Invisible (Poetic Matrix Press, 2012), Change (Will Do You Good) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2005), nominated for a Northern California Book Award, You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998), and John Danced (Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press, 1983).
Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press since 2000, she edits the press’s online environmental literary magazine, Canary. She is editor of the poetry anthology Yuba Flows (2007) and the poetry & short fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra (2002). Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary magazines, including Cimarron Review, Nimrod, Ohio Journal, and Southern Poetry Review, and her poems were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod International Journal in 2011. She and her husband live in the hills of San Francisco’s East Bay. |
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At midmorning, we decided to hike to the high elevation pools up along Wrights Creek. It was a drought year but we found a place deep enough, a sheer cliff face slicing along the pool's longest edge, and you could climb down, slide from a smooth rock into frigid water the color of long-neglected tea. The water had been so long waiting for us there, unmoving, and its cold a stinging numbness to fight through, but I said come on Hunter, not thinking he would panic and push us both under the mahogany surface where it's silent and vast like outer space -- a thing I noticed later in the dreams that came again and again -- how there was a calm beneath all the thrashing about, and I was trapped there forever, as emptiness sucked at my feet, and I dropped endlessly. The calm though to itself, I knew this would happen, always, but I pushed it down, and in the darkness my one free arm lit up like a torch searching for the smooth cliff face. |
Katherine Case is a poet, letterpress printer and former Peace Corps Volunteer whose poetry has appeared in numerous national publications. She owns and operates Meridian Press in Reno, Nevada, where she publishes poetry chapbooks, broadsides and limited-edition prints of her hand-carved, multiple-color linoleum carvings.
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Allow an Easement
Some people, she said, can’t deal with stricture or structure because chaos is so satisfying: a riot of flowers, basket of windfall, dustup of stampeding horses. Once a stable boy said she wouldn’t improve because she loved, not the horse, but the image of herself on its back. The same with dogs: a girlchild running across a meadow with rough collies barking at her heels. She meant to rein in these habits, but the easements—oh the easements—kept making crooked pathways through her dreams. Sheep’s paths, her German nanna said of wayward parts in her hair. And potatoes growing behind her ears. But she welcomed sheep and bug-eyed potatoes. Allow was a difficult word, too, permission required. Permission to prowl through half-built houses, the unsettled tract near the train trestle she often crossed. So you may ask how, today, does this girl-woman deal with allow and easement. Well. . . like the sand boa, she digs, camouflages, uses stealth, trying to appease her hunger. The key word here is abandonment-- its last four letters gone. |
Susan Terris’s most recent book is Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2013). She is the author of six books of poetry, 15 chapbooks, and three artist's books. Journal publications include The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, FIELD , The Journal, North American Review, and Ploughshares. A poem of hers from FIELD appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI. She's editor of Spillway Magazine. Her chapbook MEMOS has just been published by Omnidawn. A poem from this book, which first appeared in the Denver Quarterly—"Memo to the Former Child Prodigy" — was selected by Sherman Alexie to be published in Best American Poetry 2015.
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Departure terminal /
Not a spirited game of Chutes & Ladders nor a spin at the roulette wheel; or leaving your house for the last time, only the phone book and dictionary left unpacked. But you turning the knob of the kaleidoscope even when you knew it was broken, pretending to see something new in that tired face of the moon. Not the stars taking a tumble on the dark carpet of night but instead, resuming their rightful positions by morning — replacing our wishes for what could be with what is. Salt crystals scatter on black granite countertop, a map of constellations to flavor our last supper. Let’s promise to remember our stories even as our tongues temper and cure, even as we start to forget each other’s proper names. |
Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, N.C. She holds a B.A. in journalism and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University in New York.
Laskar is a photographer and poet -- and a former crime and government newspaper reporter. Her poems have been published in such periodicals as The Squaw Valley Review, The Tule Review and The North American Review, where her poems were finalists for the James Hearst Prize in 2011 and 2009. She now lives in California. |
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Flourish Right Now
(inscribed on a bookmark commemorating the 65th birthday of someone named Deborah) One recipient of this party favor has left it forlornly behind on the orange seat of the J train. I picture the birthday girl handing the tasseled bookmarks to partygoers as if addressing a bed of peas and carrots: Flourish right now! Even with your 65 years, Deborah, you don’t seem to know that to flourish takes time. There’s the quality of the soil to consider, the access to sunlight, the typical environmental assaults. Not everyone can sprout luxurious foliage, and no one can do it overnight. Besides, dear, it’s a party. Dispense with the directives. Or if you must, may I suggest alternative messages for next year: Do What You Can. Hang in There. Have Some Cake. |
Melinda Clemmons lives in Oakland, California. Her stories and poems have previously appeared in Kindred, Eclipse, The Cimarron Review, 300 Days of Sun, Cavalier, and The Monthly. She is a frequent contributor to the online child welfare and juvenile justice news site, "The Chronicle of Social Change."
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I Look at Istanbul with Drunken Ears
This road has been intentionally brought here with the blue bus with the strange crowd of pigeons And the impatience of the shirt and the skirt and the boots Something has happened in the mirror what is the matter with you Istanbul? You have put on somebody and this is the scent of the beloved from your shoulders the scent of earth and geraniums The evaporating colorful scent. O, City with the eyes of the sea and colorful waves Beyond the vapor in your back, walls of swear words and love letters What is the matter with you Istanbul? Where are we going with my feet of bronze in the middle of the night? With these sweet smelling dead offering tea and cigarettes why are we sitting here? I want to make love to this stone man under the rain, o city To sing barefoot to Bokhara, to listen to the body of the poplars The air is an orchard of mint tonight Do you hear? - Your health your health! How sweet is being in love These extravagant hands these shops The whirling snow pomegranate blossoms Storks in water And in shirts shadow of a dark dance. How did you find this room? I turned into music with the scent of this bed and this quilt, did you know? With the noise of these windows we laughed deeply … With you O, city, I know the scratching of this line. These singing umbrellas Something has happened to me with these clouds! My eyes cannot say Istanbul My hands cannot . . . . translated by Dr. Farideh Pourgiv |
Sheida Mohamadi, poet, fiction writer and journalist, was born in Tehran, Iran, and is the first Poet in Residence at the Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine for the 2015-2016 academic year.
Her books include, Mahtab Delash ra Goshud, Banu! (The Moonlight Opened its Heart, Lady!), Afsaneh-ye Baba Leila (The Legend of Baba Leila), Aks-e Fowri-ye Eshqbazi (The Snapshot of Lovemaking) and Yavashhaye Ghermez (Crimson whispers). |
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The Neighbors
At least in this trackless, perfect sunlight, let’s not ridicule her obscenities, the cold chapel of his disgust, nor her feet clattering down the wooden steps, scaring up the jays, his boots hammering after. And let’s not mock the multiple times they start their cars, then stop, slam the doors, begin again. No, let’s remember the holy was once everywhere before it withdrew to make room for us. And not just for seabirds flying out among the glimmer, or elk bowed down to earth. No, I’m talking about a divinity packing up for streetlights and inflatable rafts, and alcoholics anonymous and two babies I saw once at the beach throwing handfuls of sand into the other’s face. I mean the way we were given everything to be lost. And that’s not even counting loneliness. Or how, on a good day, my neighbors can glimpse Tomales bay from their porch, that conflagration of light camped in water. Though who looks straight at the kind of shining without looking away? If I ever learn to love my neighbors it will be on a morning like this, one of them screaming, You’ve stolen it all, the other sobbing, You’ve made a mockery of me, lest I forget this world is burning. Lest I forget affliction is an approximation of the spirit opening, and like every idea we hold about humanity on its way back to sanctity, imperfectly seen through. |
Julia B. Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Northern California Poetry Award for her latest collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU press 2014) as well as the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for her collection, Ask; the 1998 Anhinga Poetry Prize and bronze medal from Foreword magazine for her first collection, Practicing for Heaven, as well as a Discovery/The Nation award. Widley published, her work has been anthologized in The Places That Inhabit Us, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She received a PhD in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, and lives and works in Davis, California.
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Threads
You get used to anything, even hanging, if you hang long enough. —my great aunt Katherine This grey-black’s the new neutral among the fabrics of life’s clothing. It makes for smart darts and sewing against the bias. Make sure all your accessories match, though clash can be your match if you do enough of it. Turn heads, avoid eye contact. Eyes are for buttons. Everyone will think you look dashing, are worth snagging, or you’re too much to take in. Don the attire, belt yourself, but don’t pull a loose thread to wrinkle a sleeve, just to see where it goes. Melancholy is not enough. Snap off what’s loose instead, with your thumbnail against your finger. A thread’s nothing to hang by. |
Anna Leahy's book Constituents of Matter won the Wick Poetry Prize, and her latest chapbook, Sharp Miracles, will appear from Blue Lyra Press in 2016. Her poems and essays appear in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Crab Orchard Review, The Pinch, Gravel, Helen, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Wordpeace, and more. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she edits the journal TAB and curates the Tabula Poetica reading series. She also co-writes Lofty Ambitions blog.
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Listen
What I need to say may be faint as a rustle high in the feathery bamboo, though I want to sound bold as the stalks’ off-beat rhythm sticks in the wind. I know I fling silence over my shoulder, as I turn away, tired of your glance-- brief as a bird’s before your attention flies off-- or vague-- as if I were clouds gliding by. Let your eyes rest on my face. Arrest me in turn. I will burst from the seed of myself. |
Judy Kronenfeld’s third book of poetry, Shimmer, was published by WordTech Editions in 2012. Her most recent prior full collection is Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (2nd edition, Antrim House, 2012); her most recent chapbook is Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005). Her poems, short stories, personal essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as Avatar, Calyx, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, The American Poetry Journal, Literary Mama, Natural Bridge, Poetry International, Sequestrum, as well as many others. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Dept., UC Riverside, and Associate Editor of the online poetry journal, Poemeleon.
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Courtship
Before it became fields of big box stores and strip malls, we rode our bikes in the large square blocks of farmland, roads that went on forever before the next right, miles of rich alluvial soils, plant rows all the way to the horizon. The air smelled like dust and grain and chemicals. The asphalt was hot under our bike tires, the sound a whisk whisk, whisk whisk as we pedaled. You in front, looking for peaches and sweet corn to pick. Me in a skirt and sandals, following behind you, admiring your calves, brown and strong, your head turning to tell me something, both of us laughing as we got farther away from our college town. But that second right, the one with the white farmhouse, the picket fence, the gate open. There, the goose with its sharp yellow bill, fat with huge webbed feet, bigger than any English holiday dinner. “Gear up,” you’d tell me, both of us pumping hard, my hem flapping. Harder and harder, then faster and faster when the goose spied us, neck thrust forward, bill pointed, torpedo body propelled down the farmhouse path, honking and honking and honking, eager to attack, peck our legs and knees and feet, warning us to stay away, never come back, to stop all of it. If only we’d paid attention. |
Jessica Barksdale’s fourteenth novel, The Burning Hour, is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Compose, Salt Hill Journal, The Coachella Review, Carve Magazine, Mason’s Road, and So to Speak. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches novel writing for UCLA Extension. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
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Dream Corpse
after Mark Strand A train runs over me every night. The same train always, her name Santa Fe peeling from her side. Bone white (that’s white like death, not like the moon), my face is still intact when the conductor leans down to whisper railcars of words into my right ear, words that intimate, but do not say, I deserved this. My right ear because I took the train on my side, faced it, looked it in its two bright eyes and said, at once, hello, goodbye. The conductor, whose face wavers now, is too young for this. I apologize to each of his freckles, to each of his coming nights. I would have him stay, but let him go. And that, too, is apology. This one will not leave me though. He has found my hand, my broken hand, to clutch. It is a mash of things held and un-held. As it fades out, it tries to remember, it fixes and re-fixes, coffee mug, knife handle, banister, other hand other hand other hand jam. Other hand, I know, is already far away. The conductor feels the flailing and starts to sing me keepsakes. This is always the gift given at the last, this clutching, this singing, this hush and listen please. This settle, this soften, this beside me on his knees. He croons away the many times I mistook the water for the blood. Look, look here. This is your blood. Red, even in the dark, not just a nebulous wetness, but red, even with my eyes closed. I feel what seems like wind rushing over what is left of skin. The conductor is carrying me, me, trembling core, down streets I know, past houses whose histories I’ve memorized. Block by block his steps unsew the faded quilt of neighborhood, of ruined long ago. Why does he make me move? This is sign language for rescue, a sign he cannot make alone. When you bleed out, I promise this, you will be carried home. He stops at the edge of my mother’s broken flower bed. The iris, just now in bloom, the wilted tangle of daylilies a month past peak, the rose bush that will be coy yet for a few more weeks. He lays me underneath the tree whose branches mother tipped with blue glass bottles. He leaves me then, a vagrant in my own backyard, to finish this beneath the tree. To finish this, to find the place where it will end, to will the end underneath the kitchen window, to feel the wind, to mimic it with my own expiring. I, too, would look away from this, would ask to be excused, and so I settle on his youth as the reason for his loping step that carries him from this night to another, that couldn’t zero in on this moment, that couldn’t bear to watch my quick passage from heavy to hover. |
Anna Finn is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California Irvine. Her critical work explores experimental prosody in Victorian and modernist poetry. Her work has appeared in BOXCAR Poetry Review and the Nashville Review.
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Cherubim
If you believe in the low light of Babylon, the cherubim wisp-colored, like milkweed, the final phase of the moon that brings you nearer to God, then you will be nearer to God. If you believe in the clouded sky cataract and malnourished in its light, you will know the many assembled angels holding on, their mouths mouthing paradise. If you believe in the woman who wanted to live in color on this earth, you will believe the faces sketched to keep them all alive, how she bought time shading the folds of their flesh, blending salt and spit with black to bring out the red like the scarlet blooded calf, as in the way we used to pray, holding on to sacrifice, indistinguishable from prayer. Where was the azure, the celestial blue, to make the simple sky? The light seemed spun from shadow. In all this shadow where would she put the sky? Along the contours of the subjects’ tiny feet? Among the golden fruits, the brown bark of a tree, a plume of dust — the still life she was advised to paint. Off in the corner, an assemblage of cherubim, a tableau of god and his winged intimates holding on to their own thin bones. Somewhere she will find the blue for heaven. She will find the light that’s left. Breath taking, how like birds they flinched when caught. Had they wings, would they have flown? For Annemarie Dinah Gottliebova |
Carine Topal is a transplanted New Yorker living in the southern California desert. Her work has appeared in The Best of the Prose Poem, Greensboro Review, Spoon River Poetry Anthology, Water~Stone, and many other journals and anthologies. Her second collection of poetry, Bed of Want, won the 2007 Robert G. Cohen Prose Poetry Award . In 2005 she was the recipient of a scholarship to Hedgebrook, and to the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. Topal’s third collection, In the Heaven of Never Before, was published in 2008 by Moon Tide Press. That same year she was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Topal was awarded the 2015 Briar Cliff Review Award for Poetry. That same week she was the winner of the 4th Biennial Chapbook Contest from Palettes and Quills, for her book Tattooed, released in July, 2015.
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RAKE
When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what is happening? The golden wind is revealing itself. —Zen koan Poetry showed me a red wheel barrow alone in the rain but there is also a red, ruined rake, prongs twisted and metal split, lying in a suburban street. The cars veer to miss it but no one stops to save their own (or others’) tires. They are busy regarding the future through their windshields. Well, I stop. I swerve into a store lot, dart my self into the street, move that rake from its concrete grave and throw it in the backseat. I drive, and then arrive at the zendo, where people sit in silence then converse on falling leaves and the gale or graceful forces of the season. But the koan of the day doesn’t quite hit me that way-- sweet autumnal phases and how we shelter when it’s necessary. I see the twisted rake, beneath a withered tree, or adrift in my backseat, and feel relief. To know that it doesn’t all depend on that pure wheelbarrow, living eternal on the page. To know that we—our tools, our dreams, our hardened streets, the way you lick my neck and furiously need me—all fall away, and what is left is really nothing of our own making. |
Amy Elizabeth Robinson is a writer, poet, mother, and historian living in the hills of Sonoma County, California. She holds degrees from Princeton, University College London, and Stanford, and now studies Zen and the creative process at the Pacific Zen Institute. She was recently named a Contributing Editor of PZI’s forthcoming online literary/arts journal, Uncertainty Club. Her writing has appeared in Vine Leaves, DASH, and the North Bay Bohemian, and as part of Rattle’s innovative Poets Respond program. Amy is currently training to become a poet-teacher with California Poets in the Schools, and when kids and poems aren’t calling she blogs about creativity, spirituality, and social change.
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THE YEAR OF FOUR DECADES
The year I turned forty, I discovered thirty-nine anagrams misspelling my name for each season, written years ago. Awaken here line. Hearken lain ewe. Healer wake nine. The year I turned forty, my monthly bleeding lightened by a teaspoon. The year I turned forty, no one could tell I was not thirty-nine. The year I turned forty, winter made no change in my mood. The year I turned forty, as my bleeding lightened, a girl-angel sat next to me, drawing with her left hand. The year I turned forty, a girl-angel covered my forehead with her wings when I woke from nightmares. When I turned forty, a blind woman said a hummingbird whirled close to her eyes -- a blossoming lemon tree -- and flew away: two years, a teaspoon, thirty-nine, a girl-angel, a bird. |
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living(Quaci Press 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she serves as Full Professor of English and Chair at a liberal arts college in greater Los Angeles, where she is also a novice harpist. Lee is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.
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New Life with Bees and Fire
“Woman gives birth, fights off bees, starts wildfire in Northern California” My mother’s head was wreathed in nonsense. My mother’s head was wreathed in the shadows of owls And sometimes in stars, a million winks around her. My mother’s head was wreathed in sweat, in tears. My mother’s head was wreathed in bees. Their buzzing was the second language I learned. My mother’s head hung low when she slept. My mother’s head was wreathed in regret. She whispered in the night, no phone, no water, four apples to eat, Stupid short-cut through the woods, over the river And through the woods to grandmother’s house, she sang And she whispered. Her head hung low when she slept. Her breathing was the first language I’d learned. My mother’s head was wreathed in apple-breath. My mother’s head was wreathed in daylight then moonlight. My mother’s head was beautiful and terrible in sorrow. My mother’s head was close to mine, close to mine, Her breath was warm and soft and apple-riddled. My mother’s head was wreathed in daylight again and again. My mother’s head was filled with get-away plans: Walk out, float out, fly out on the wings of owls. My mother’s head was wreathed in nonsense, in tears. My mother’s head was wreathed in smoke. My mother’s head was wreathed in smoke and in flames that rushed and crackled. The fire language was the third language I learned. My mother’s head close to mine, her lips close to mine, Breathing and breathing with the smoke all around her. My mother’s head was wrapped in relief like stars When the rescuers came. They tamped out the fire, They took us away from the owls and shadows, the bees, the flames, the winking stars, and we began to begin the beginning again. |
Gillian Wegener has had poetry published in Clade Song, Homestead Review, The Monterey Bay Review, and Wherewithal. Her chapbook Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other was published by In the Grove Press in 2001, and her first full-length collection of poetry, The Opposite of Clairvoyance was published in 2008 by Sixteen Rivers Press. She was the 2015 winner of Zocalo Public Square’s Poetry Prize for a poem of place, and the inaugural winner of the Wherewithal Poetry Prize (2015). Wegener hosts the monthly 2nd Tuesday Reading Series in downtown Modesto, is founding president of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, teaches creative writing to girls in juvenile hall, and has served since 2012 as the poet laureate for the City of Modesto.
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At Least This
Crouched over kitchen floor on hands and knees, back arched not feline-graced but thrashing wobbly on a sponge pad, I lurch and scrunch scrub-brush bristles against textured surface, churn down back around, choppy, push out residue of dust, plunge at straight-line heel-marks, pant in turmoil over a vagrant yellow spot, fingers bone-tight around hard thin plastic handle. Combination of soap water dirt froths into lightly-tinted gray soup to be wiped up with a ragged cloth all to the fitful rhythm of determination to succeed at least in this. |
Cleo Griffith was Chair of the Editorial Board of Song of the San Joaquin for twelve years and remains on the Board. She has been published in: POEM, Cider Press Review, Iodine, Main Street Rag, More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets, the Aurorean, The Furnace Review, The Lyric, Tiger’s Eye, Time of Singing and others. She is a member of the Modesto branch of the National League of American Pen Women.
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In Dubuffet's hourloupe tide
I’m on you like a row of knuckles stacked and tunneled to another row of knuckles in order to speak louder I need a place to stay where I am not staying but I am circling, circling your red with my blue circling your face with my stripes circling your body with a dance a kind of stripe on sock on foot on wood floor dance where I slide into you with a can-can I can I am a blue-eyed dinosaur with teeth I know how to use on you and when I am solid I’m yellow when I am solid I’m red when I am solid blue I’m only touching your black your black for my blue your hoot for my holler your loop for my knot and don’t disagree where we are not color we are white bone and when we are bleached it means the rest of our performing parts fell away when we were a traveling circus moving through the desert means that we were left midway to somewhere for the sun to touch sun solid yellow a star I always failed to kiss in the finale |
Janelle DolRayne is a former poetry editor of Copper Nickel and art and production editor of The Journal. Her poems and essay have appeared in The Laurel Review, The Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, The Collagist, Parcel, Interrupture, and the 2013 Best of the Net Anthology, among others. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Vandewater Poetry Award, and an M.F.A. degree from The Ohio State University. She is originally from Coal Creek Canyon, CO, and currently calls Los Angeles home.
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Lapsang Souchong Pine Song
~ Made in the tradition of slowly smoking large and thick leaves over natural pine tree roots. It’s the strongest brew. Mountain forests in rising steam penetrating the farthest land in your brain, waking you into a camping morning, sun rays piercing pine needles. Roused from your tent by smoke you stamp into boots and hold a warm mug, shaking while the scent invades you. Hot mittens. Drink. Winston Churchill drank it. The most extreme variety is smoked over burning pine tar, evokes a stogie’s waft. As you brew it, trees and turpentine arise, your father’s soaking paintbrush, forests of endless stoic pines. That scent. A thousand chill dawns of childhood, tea plantations, and Chinese restaurants, a crisp sting on palate, in nose, shivering up the shadow centuries and race wars, subjugation, and afternoons of dust-motes drifting through the studio, boredom modeling, the rifting worlds blended in a cup of East-West. That scent. Drink up. |
Rachel Dacus is a poet and writer who has just completed a novel of love, quest, and forgiveness set in contemporary and Renaissance Italy involving the great sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini. Her books are Gods of Water and Air, a collection of poetry, prose, and drama; and the poetry collections Earth Lessons and Femme au Chapeau. She has written on topics that range from art, travel, Alzheimer’s, and infertility, to being the daughter of a bipolar rocket scientist during the race-to-space Cold War. She raises funds for nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and blogs at Rocket Kids.
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Dark into Dawn
My daughter wakes me early to hold the baby so she can sleep a little. I gladly cradle the newborn who’s flung our lives wide open as a train door on arrival, the night platform lit by her nimbus. All around us hushed cliffs and blue time slip down to the sea. I hesitate a moment to listen to the baby’s breath flicker in dream then settle into faint rise and fall beneath my fingers, the tides held in my arms. The hall is still dark and silent, the pale blinds of the room louvered open. Soon I can make out my daughter’s garden. Here the giant artichoke purples to bloom, there the old hedge broods. Finches and sparrows natter. Here’s the quick zzzzzt of a hummingbird. There a neighbor’s car drones amiably down the street. I watch the baby’s closed eyes - soft pink clams, upturned nose, half-open sea-whelk mouth, tiny mollusk tongue testing the air. I might have thought she’d washed ashore or slipped from the back of a dolphin if I hadn’t witnessed her mother labor long to deliver her. Now the sun strikes the grass, creeps down the white fence, bathes the world. The baby opens her eyes, stirs with hunger for mother’s milk, for everything that fills that sweet distance between breast and face. She fastens her still gaze on me. I remember why the baby is holy. She starts to cry. This too, holy. I carry her back to her drowsy mother who loves her more than she can grasp as she lies awash at the edge of day. |
Regina O'Melveny is a writer and assemblage artist whose award-winning poetry and prose have been anthologized and widely published in literary magazines such as The Bellingham Review, The Sun, The LA Weekly, Solo, The Wild Duck Review, and Dark Matter: Women Witnessing. Her long poem "Fireflies" won the Conflux Press Poetry Award and was published as an artist's book designed by Tania Baban. Blue Wolves, a collection of poems with reproductions of her assemblages, won the Bright Hill Press poetry book award. Her novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, was published by Little, Brown and Company, and was listed under “Time Passages: The Year’s Best Historical Fiction” for 2012 at npr.org. She lives with her husband in Rancho Palos Verdes.
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WILD TURKEYS You don’t expect to see wild turkeys wandering the manicured lawns of this small, middle-class town, but there they are: teal-headed, with bright red gorgets, brown-feathered sides, shimmering pink, their fabulous tails fanning open around them, so they are suddenly enlarged, and then sleeking back down as they move with speed over the ground, into the pine trees, seven of them, gobbling like an old-timey, honky-tonk band: strange angels of God’s latest ragtime miracle, something beautiful like a parable. |
Jane Beal, PhD, is a poet. Born, raised, and educated in California, she is the creator of many poetry collections, including Sanctuary (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Rising (Wipf and Stock, 2015), as well as three recording projects that combine poetry and music: Songs from the Secret Life, Love-Song, and with her brother, saxophonist and composer Andrew Beal, The Jazz Bird. She also writes fiction, creative non-fiction, and literary criticism. She has served as a professor at Wheaton College and Colorado Christian University, teaching creative writing and literature, and as a midwife in the U.S., Uganda, and the Philippine Islands. She currently teaches at the University of California, Davis.
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The pigment of the country Edging the roads and staining them, counting the animals: sheep: llama: pig: turkey vulture: iron giraffe. The road goes on, edged in red, eyed for no reason at all, keeping motion down, and disappearing in the curve, heaving through the curve alone in green and there and there regretting not saying the word or bringing it up, forgetting to tell oneself, to present one’s self, to come back to the home country, return there, and say: let me work, I know the land. I know the way out and sound my way back, with the wives, the claims the morels dug deep, an upturned valise by the banks: out of the suitcases into the fire, yes, they came from here and arrived back in it and fled under a cloud of words, forgive them. |
Genevieve Kaplan is the author of In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation's poetry publication prize, and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013), a chapbook of continual erasures. She lives in southern California and edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose.
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Babies Sent by U.S. Mail
In 1913, the New York Times reported that Mrs. Jesse Beagle successfully mailed her baby to his grandmother for 15 cents, insured him for 50 dollars. The staged photo: a deadpan, no-smiles mailman with droopy bag, heavy with an upright baby like a stalk of celery topping out the grocery sack. Baby, too, is unburdened by a smile; he’s in the process of being processed by the U.S. Mail. But Baby Beagle, his 10 ¾ pounds just under the limit, was slapped with stamps, and handed over to the trusted mailman. Sent by mama; delivered one mile to grandma. Did the carrier carry a rattle? A spare diaper? In case he spent all day transporting babies from mom to aunt to grandpa and back to mom. When mama kissed little Beagle goodbye and he found himself bouncing along hip-height in a rough burlap sack, poked by envelopes and scratched by twine, did he know Grandma was but a mile away, even now warming the milk and outfitting the cradle, or did he think the sack his new home, travel his way of life? |
Cathy Barber’s poetry has been published recently in Slant, the San Diego Poetry Annual and Literary Mama. Her work has been anthologized many times, including The Cancer Poetry Project 2, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2013, Midwest Book Awards and Changing Harm to Harmony, an anthology about bullying. Her poetry can be found online through her website. She is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program and the California State University, Hayward, Masters in English program. A past president of the board of California Poets in the Schools and a current member of the advisory board, Barber teaches in classrooms in San Mateo County.
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JULIANA, 1803
The iron lock turns at dusk, our parents on the other side in the mission village, us girls in this dark room. The priest carries the key in his robe, gives it back to the Madre at dawn so we can join him in prayers before receiving our work orders. I’ve hated night for as long as I can remember. When the padre came to our hut, told my mother I was seven years old now, old enough to require the monjerio, she told me, “Remember the stars. Remember you’ll see them again someday.” But I’ve forgotten – are they silver, or gold? Which direction do they move? Where is the one my mother warned me was sly and mean-spirited? She told me once that blazing stars with long tails were souls on their way to the afterlife. I wonder if the sky burns all night now? Some of the younger girls still miss their mothers, cry half the night, wet themselves. They keep the rest of us awake. I don’t feel sorry for them; I hiss the curses I learned from the soldados to frighten them, make them shut up. The pinche workday is long enough without losing sleep too. I don’t remember being that weak. True, I had my two older sisters. For years they kept me tucked between them all night; if the door opened in the darkness, if soldiers picked the lock or stole the padre’s key, or if the padre himself made one of his ‘inspections,’ Dolores pushed me behind her, Ines covered me with her blanket. Till they married those brothers and got out. Now I lie awake at night, tuck my back into this corner I’ve claimed and defend when I have to. Smelling some poor woman’s shit as she crouches over the trench in the corner, moaning that the posole this morning must’ve had rotten meat. My own bowels twist and boil, but please God let me make it till morning, and the privacy of a bush or hillside. And I think about that soldier, Demetrio, the one who came with the San Blas Infantry from someplace called Mexico. The Spanish guards laugh at him, call him ‘chulo,’ which means, I think, halfbreed. They ask him which jail the military pulled him out of, what crime did he commit, has he learned how to shoot an escopeta. They make him sound like a little boy. I know he’s not. Yesterday on the path returning from the lavanderia, I hung back, pretended my basket of wet clothes was too heavy. He slipped me a string of dark red beads, my favorite, and said he would speak to the Padre soon. Then he pressed against me, knocked my basket into the dirt, spilled all that hard work. He put his hairy mouth on mine. I couldn’t move. Clara called my name, and he pushed me away, ducked back into the trees. Tonight I can still feel his hands clutching my breasts. I wonder. I wonder what it would be like, to see the stars again. "[In California's Franciscan missions] girls who had passed their eighth year were housed in the monjerio in which they were confined under lock and key at night to protect their virtue. The monjerio also served as a training school in which girls and widows were confined much of the time. This separation of children from families was justified since at a tender age they had not fully developed fixed habits and beliefs and thus were more easily influenced by missionaries." |
Deborah Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area, and author of the mixed-genre Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir as well as two poetry collections - Indian Cartography and The Zen of La Llorona; she is also co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two Spirit Literature. Her work has been published widely in literary journals such as Platte Valley Review, Natural Bridge, Yellow Medicine Review, Callaloo, Calyx, Cimarron Review. She is working on a collection of essays tentatively titled Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and Other California Indian Lacunae, and a collection of poems in the voices of each California mission. |
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Reading Miller's Essay “On
Tragedy and the Common Man” with My Teenage Son
the Night Before Receiving the Radiologist's Report My teenage son struggles to interpret Miller's prose Which to me says nothing more than We're all in this together, that tragedy Is not a state reserved for nobility Or the 1%, but instead can afflict us all, So when my son asks me to help with his essay, I happily oblige, because: how much Longer do I have with him, really? And when Miller cites the psychology Of Oedipus and Orestes, I ask and and am informed That my son neither wants to marry me, nor to kill me; Instead, he just wants to finish the damn essay. So I struggle to translate Miller's turns of phrase Into language my son can understand: mocking jays, And the strategy of applying one's intellect To save one's skin. The drama of loss. When the structure of the essay requires him To choose sides-- either with or against Miller-- He opts to remain unconvinced, although I suspect that if I had done a better job He would be more willing to risk being wrong. In the morning I will pick up the radiologist's report Which will tell me at which particular crossroads I stand, but the tragedy of this does not lie In the outcome, instead, in the dumb optimism Of thinking that one outcome might be preferable to another; But what good does it do us to fixate On endings when everything depends Upon the liminal, the little deaths that happen each day While we wait to live. |
Cati Porter is the author of Seven Floors Up and My Skies of Small Horses (forthcoming, 2016) as well as four chapbooks, most recently The Way Things Move The Dark. She is founder and editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry, and Executive Director of the Inlandia Institute, a regionally-focused literary nonprofit and independent press.
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Prayer
after Frida Kahlo Not your dancer or rare white flower. You must learn refusal. You make me a widow, a dark bird strung on a wire. You come to me, but I won’t rattle in your arms. I won’t meet you for any song. My paintings are my other skin. Dear hermanita, running in and out of rooms. The men carve me, but my bones cut back. Sometimes she turns into a river. Our union was more than color. The light returns and returns. Diego, it is your love that I must survive. |
Shelley Wong is a Kundiman fellow who lives in Oakland, CA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Vinyl, Linebreak, The Normal School, Devil's Lake, and Ninth Letter Online. She was a 2013-14 poetry editor for The Journal and received the 2014 Normal Prize for poetry.
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Feeding Horses
Cold mornings they’re empty in the night trance. The day is building inside them. They pretend to be asleep or throw their heads impatient. Sometimes the ground is frozen. The young one tells me his feet hurt. Where are my green capezios? The old one wears my mother’s fur coat. The sun is his morning pillow. Some days their noses are tight. Noses say a lot. A low sound when they see me. I measure myself in the doing, shaping, giving, taking. If they don’t like what I feed them they spit it out. It's an observer's game of the universe. I know their bodies in space. Evenings they tell me about the isle of sky. I ask them, do you leave this field? They call me their horse girl. In their bellies are voices; men, women. Under their feet; birds, dogs. In their manes; mud. You expect me to say feeding horses is a holy calling. When I’m done I throw the bucket. I can tell if I’m loose or tight. Today is medium. It’s common work. They leave me long. |
Barbara March's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cascadia, The Transnational, Agave Journal, Yemassee, Mudlark, Berkeley Poetry Review, Orion, Denver Quarterly, Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, Words Fly Away: Poems for Fukushima Anthology and other journals and publications. Most recently she was a semi-finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She is a member of the Northern California Book Reviewers and serves on the poetry judging committee for the Northern California Book Awards. Her interviews and articles have been published in Poetry Flash. She's a co-founder of the Surprise Valley Writers' Conference and lives in Cedarville, California.
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Lone Pine and Mt. Whitney
after the painting, Near Lone Pine, California, 1924, by John Frost The mountains and their lunatic height provide so ready a drama the settlers need never fear going soft, being bored or feeling life's too easy. Almost perpendicular, the peaks rise behind the desert house and corral. Early sun smacks an implacable presence right into their waking. They look up to see lines of snow in the high crevices all summer long while their lowland creek relinquishes May girth to a couple inches of ripple. The house-garden gasps, cottonwood trees and creosote bushes seem to cough in the drying wind and there's no way to cool the kitchen down. Up there the stark peaks, granite gray, perfectly match snow's white vocabulary. It seems they hear it all the time, something about being so small, something about being snarled up in the minute to minute rumple of meals and laundry and pumping water for baths. Look, the cliffs seem to say, look at what it means to be relinquished into what's beyond breath, beyond fingernails or food or how to make yourself understood. |
Grace Marie Grafton’s book, Jester, was published in 2013 by Hip Pocket Press. She is the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems won first prize in the Soul Making contest (PEN women, San Francisco), in the annual Bellingham Review contest, Honorable Mention from Anderbo and Sycamore Review, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poems recently appear in Poecology, The Offending Adam, Canary, CA Quarterly, The Evansville Review, poetrymagazine.com and others.
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What a Poem Can Do
A minute splinter lodges in my heel’s tough part. Needles and tweezers don’t work. Limping around, upsetting balance, I’m certain it will infect and fester, my spine will go from walking akimbo, my heart, from lack of exercise. As a girl, anemic and prone to blood poisoning, I remember long foot-soaks, my dad finally lancing the wound, my aunts hovering at the doorway (sepsis killed a younger brother). Now in my tub, I sit with both feet in hottest water, brandy on ice in one hand, Ovid’s The Amores in the other, then slather on Neosporin, apply a Band-Aid. Hobbling around the kitchen, I fix pulled pork in the crockpot, make coffee, go back to bed, turn to a poem about trajectory, reach down and flick out pain with my thumbnail. |
Jeanine Stevens studied poetry at U.C. Davis, and has an M.A. in Anthropology. Winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt and one of two finalists for the William Stafford Prize. Author of Sailing on Milkweed (Cherry Grove Collections). Her latest chapbook is Needle in the Sea (Tiger’s Eye Press. Poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Evansville Review, South Dakota Review, Pearl, Quercus Review and Perfume River. Besides writing, Jeanine enjoys Tai Chi, collage and Romanian folk dance. She was raised in Indiana and now lives in Sacramento and Lake Tahoe with her husband, photographer Gregory Czalpinski. |
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ORBIT SONG
For everything beaten and beating the bright scars of uranium glowing in a private dark every dark bowl the poplars gather on thin branches breaking and broken each mechanical heart stitched in its moorings the body radiating from the courageous love of its gears For everything moored and unmoored space operas careening through black holes loosed and singing glass notes along a mile’s curve and each silence arrow-shot into moments before and after with their own kind of bass, all fragments and kindnesses born of blue ice, the blue scrim of beyond that locates the tiny helix on its stem For every aberration, every rift and swell when blueprint slid away and the cell mass swerved from its knowing and knowing no fathom forward began so many futures the breath the split light every dry mouth eaten and eating |
Jennifer K. Sweeney's "Orbit Song" appears in her most recent collection, Little Spells (New Issues Press, 2015). She is also the author of How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Sweeney's poems have been published in literary journals including Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She currently lives in Redlands, CA, but you can visit anytime at www.jenniferksweeney.com. |
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Why Does Godzilla Have To Die?
Joe says I don’t know how to smile and he doesn’t. In each photo he reminds me of a different Muppet, his lips taking in that sewn aspect, a rounded edge, eyes closed. His head is monstrous he says so we practice nodding my freakishly small head forward and his back in the frame for our selfies. He says you can never have enough selfies and I don’t know what he means. He’s an expert on Godzilla, glad they reinstated the fire breathing from the original. Godzilla grabs the monster’s insect-beak mouth, pries it open, forces a beam of flame down its throat until it collapses into a blackened corpse at Godzilla’s prehistoric stumpfeet. With my nephew, everything is young. We discover the beaten-down track high in Donner Canyon where the Steven’s trail climbed in 1844. Here’s our selfie at the secret plaque. We look for wagon wheel ruts in the stone. When did the pioneers know they couldn’t turn back? Everything is living only once and yet here a seeping spring has raised horsetail fronds the last pioneer walking behind the last wagon paused to run his hand across. How could they not keep going? Everyone arrives at a foreign country, even Godzilla. How he killed the monster was strangely intimate. When Joe was a toddler and Godzilla died he screamed NO! and threw his toy Godzilla across the room where it hit my father’s new wife. Compassion is a slippery thing always breaking like a yoke without a shell. Someone hung metal wind chimes to the roof of the snow sheds protecting the train tracks and Joe fears the mournful ringing through the shadowed tunnels. It is very windy. We run as far as we can in the bars of sound to the edge of an old darkness. |
Karen A. Terrey earned her MFA from Goddard College. She is a writing coach in Truckee, CA, through her business Tangled Roots Writing. Her poems have been published in Sierra Nevada Review, Rhino, Edge, and Meadow and are forthcoming at Cider House Review. Her chapbook Bite and Blood is published by Finishing Line Press.
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Field
And when he returned to the car, orange colored his jeans, his thighs, just above his knees, orange. And just then, briefly she imagined where he had been, seeing him as never before: in the field walking, near the road, sun blessed ear lobes, sweet fingers, broad chest, the field thick with tall poppies, flower heads swollen spilling pollen on his thighs. She blinked to believe his return. Ground resolves to figure. Car door slammed; he threw a Dorito bag, empty, to dusty floor mats. And wiped his hands on his pants, one more time, just above his knees. |
Judith Rodby is Professor Emeritus from California State University, Chico. Currently she lives in Reno, Nevada where she studies book arts and does letterpress printing at Black Rock Press (UNR). She has published numerous academic books and articles on literacy studies. |
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The Country of Illness
Your body no longer belongs to you but to technicians whose work is the body. Your time is engaged in translating the complex currency, adapting to customs that seem pure insult where you come from. Travel here is light and clatter when you want dim sleep. Visitors with their annoying questions, as if you knew anything useful. It takes all your time to decipher the map, the border instructions, while you slowly work to put together the price of the ticket back to the land where we take our bodies blessedly for granted. You swear if your frail craft ever arrives at that shore, you’ll relish every moment without pain, appreciate the feet that carry you, the arms that lift and hold and lift again at your command. But it’s not possible. The healthy breathe health as fish breathe water. We move at will, cursing the burnt clutch, the spilled coffee, while the dark blood pulses, and health shimmers, thoughtless as moonlight on black water. |
Meryl Natchez’s most recent book is a bilingual volume of translations from the Russian: Poems From the Stray Dog Café: Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilev. She is co-translator of Tadeusz Borowski: Selected Poems. Her book of poems, Jade Suit, appeared in 2001. Natchez has had a career as a technical writer. She founded and managed a technical writing business, TechProse, was co-founder of the non-profit, Opportunity Junction, and raised four children. She blogs at www.dactyls-and-drakes.com. |
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The last catch
My father squats at the lake edge in his tweed sports coat, holding three dead rainbow trout, bankrupt of color. With his fingers in their gills, those fish, mouths agape, look still hungry for a worm without a hook, doomed never to figure out that anything you really want comes barbed. Upstate the blue dusks of summer bring water to the air. The sun slips under the mountains; we live indigo hours until darkness takes us to a campfire or brings us home. I was a girl when my father showed me how a hook slid in easily and then snagged. I didn’t give it much thought until Mom had to work one out of her cheek. You’ve got to clip it and push it clean through to the other side. You can howl all you want but someone needs steady hands. I don’t think my dad believed in much, but if you saw him tying a fly to the line and casting it long over a smooth lake you might have thought him blessed with a serenity to envy. Even in the blue light, he seemed a lively player, a man who had caught a nice supper, someone who would stay at the table, not choose to cash it all in. Holding out those fish, he’d grin like he was showing three of a kind. Jacks maybe, a winning hand. |
Liz Tynes Netto is a writer and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in The Mas Tequila Review, The East Jasmine Review, FRE&D, and are forthcoming in the anthology, SHALE: Extreme Fiction for Extreme Conditions. |
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When It’s Hot Enough to Peel Off Your Skin
And you’ve rolled the windows down, the car coughing over every pothole, and the world is green to your left and to your right. The first weekend of summer, and everything unfastens you. When the orchards are mulched it’s hard to believe six months have passed since you made applesauce with your shoes, nosing around for the last of the death-sweetened fruits. The branches espaliered as if they’re dancing, as the baby grapes, within arm’s reach, foreshadow or reminisce exactly where you were last year, this time. This is the greatest blessing staying in one place offers-- Grace of custom, seeing the small finches go out and come back to the eaves of your life until it becomes a nest, until you learn to not be good at everything right away, like a rhythm, allowing it to be messy, gloriously, over again. |
Kaitlin Deasy grew up in Northern California and attended the University of California at Berkeley where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. Her poems have appeared in Wild Violet and are forthcoming from West Marin Review. She currently resides north of San Francisco and works as a freelance writer. |
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Sleep Is Your Shepherd, Little Mother When you wake up scared don’t know who what where your careful breadcrumbs— food for the birds your stories— swallowed by the wolf when your Music has gone dissonant, gone deaf and your viola has limped away, into the woods sleep will take you back tuck you into your lonesome bed be your long lost Hansel swing you deep into that fairy world you lost to the madman’s fire, little Gretel so many lifetimes ago The Great Lake that knew your summer breaststroke is blue, without you The Chicago wind that blusters and whips but never could knock you down, can’t figure where you’ve gone While I— your only daughter— fly towards you in your 91st September through dismal skies Sleep is your shepherd, little Gretel your forest, your cave your passage through the mountains. But I need the light in your eyes. I need your laugh at the world’s wild ride before the ancestors cast their nets, little mother and gather you back |
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s poetry is widely published. Her fourth poetry collection, The Faust Woman Poems, follows one woman’s Faustian adventures during the 1960s and ‘70s, through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. Her memoir, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way tells stories of her pushy muse. She is also the author of The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to find Her Female Roots. Lowinsky is a Jungian Analyst, a member of the San Francisco Jung Institute where she has taught a poetry workshop, Deep River, for many years. She is co-editor, with Patricia Damery of the essay collection Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way as well as Poetry Editor of Psychological Perspectives, a publication of the Los Angeles Jung Institute. |
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Sweatshop, Oakland, 1911
That the loss of a few fingers was normal wear and tear. That the eyes got used to the lack of light. That the skin paled, became papery. That the sun ripped open the day. That the soot never washed out from under fingernails. That the back never straightened again. That the fingers shook. That the days lengthened after the earthquake. Stitched closer and closer together by nervous bosses. That the cracks were never filled. Grew wider. That the sun strained to enter the greasy windows until night broke it. That the irons singed. That the beams ached every time a train passed. That the girls looked up nervously to see what others had done. That girls fainted regularly. That young girls of seven or eight were fastest. That they secretly sang to each other under their breath. |
Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s debut poetry collection, Gold Passage, won the Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in 2013. Her chapbooks Inheritance and The Flying Trolley were published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry, essays and creative non-fiction have been published in Fence, Volt, The New Guard, Lake Effect, Sugar Mule, Calyx and many more journals. Dunkle teaches writing and literature at Napa Valley College. She received her B.A. from the George Washington University, her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University, and her Ph.D. in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. She is on the staff of the Napa Valley Writers conference.
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Something Has Lifted
My husband sprints through the house as if he could outrun the grief. He rushes through the kitchen, checks his oversized iPhone, grabs his keys, and most days his wedding ring, asks, Did I kiss you yet?, before shutting the door. Sometimes I miss the smell of coffee brewing in our first house by the beach before we got married and stopped drinking coffee. The palm tree in the front yard swayed in the wind, slow like our days together. We’d toast bagels, browse nurseries, plant Lambs Ear and Impatiens in our rented garden. Then have sex, take a nap, and do it all again. Today, my husband leans against the kitchen counter like he used to, smiling in a way I haven’t seen him smile in a long time, his face relaxed, open. Last night, I watched him play Transformers with Desmond for the first time the way he used to play with Riley. A large dinosaur rests on the tile floor, legs in the air like surrender. Apparently, he lost the battle with Optimus Prime. I feel horrible, my husband says. Desmond walks into the kitchen with the same smile as his father, their faces like two halves of the same broken geode as they clean the toys off the floor. |
Chanel Brenner is the author of Vanilla Milk: a memoir told in poems, (Silver Birch Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Rattle, Cultural Weekly, The Coachella Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Foliate Oak, and others. Her poem, “What Would Wislawa Szymborska Do?” was displayed at the James Whitcomb Riley Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana; and her poem, “July 28th, 2012” won first prize in The Write Place At the Write Time’s contest, judged by Ellen Bass. In 2014, she was nominated for a Best of the Net award and a Pushcart Prize
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Resolutions
Last night the trees kept lashing the dark. Listen to me this once, it’s not just the mice ticking in back of the woodwork, or the clock logy with time, or the way dreams filibuster the morning light. We’ve made so many resolutions lately, improvised ways to give time the slip-- like the day we were trudging through catch weed, trying to get back on the path, when we saw a flock of quail rising up into the turning light, the field grasses bending their heads as if taking another vow. |
Jeanne Wagner is the winner of the 2014 Hayden’s Ferry 500/500 and 2014 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Award. Her poems appear in Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and American Life in Poetry. She is on the editorial board of California Quarterly. She has five collections of poetry, the most recent, In the Body of Our Lives, was released by Sixteen Rivers press in 2011.
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A sextant for latitude
I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe. Robert Louis Stevenson Perhaps we could find it on a map: the place where we were purely our strawberry selves, and so tasty. Just follow the blue line that flickers its way between landmarks of differing elevations— ignore the turn-offs, dead-ends, wide passing lanes; those marked alternatives where you would end up somewhere else, and nowhere near the “we” we were back then. This map is vast; the place minute; the instant might shoot past unnoticed, as so many do. Proust would be pleased at how a fluke occurrence summons you, delicious years of miles later, transports you to me by its own separate savor to a single taste in time. Re-do the geometry, find where lines x and y intersect on the map of inextinguishable moments, each one unseen until illuminated in memory. |
Annie Stenzel's poems or translations have most recently appeared in the print journals Catamaran Literary Reader, Quiddity, and Ambit, in an anthology titled Patient Poets, and in the online journal Unsplendid. She has work forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Pirene's Fountain, and Right Hand Pointing.
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Fog Week
At first, I enter it. I put on my fog gloves and my fog shoes, and pass unnoticed as a tree. Sky assumes the color of aged bone, fog the moist marrow. The world is barely probable. What commerce is conducted on afternoons like this? More dull currency of nickel, silver, steel, lead. Along the wide beach, dunes shrink away from an invisible ocean. I hear the whimper of waves. Day after day, the fog is an ossuary-- there are no paths that don’t lead to bones. A hunched fisherman tips his pole at nothing but what he knows existed before it was erased. |
Susan Cohen lives in Berkeley and is the author of Throat Singing (WordTech; 2012) as well as recent poems in Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sou'wester, Tar River Poetry, and the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She won the Milton Kessler Poetry Award from Harpur Palate, among other honors, and has an MFA from Pacific University.
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What Falls Away
What falls away is always. And is near — Theodore Roethke, “The Waking” What falls away is morning. It gives rise to afternoon, till it too fades away, allowing stars to wheel upon the skies and the moon to light a path across the bay. What falls away is winter with the urge to disappear like moles beneath the earth. Spring follows, and the lilacs start to surge as deer lie down in grass and then give birth. What falls away is anger and despair, the fight about some foolish thing, the tears. Next comes the dance, a glass of wine to share, and laughter reaching to the stratosphere So if your fortunes take a sudden dive, just hang on. Something else will soon arrive. |
Lucille Lang Day is the author of eight poetry collections and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue, Infinities, and Wild One. Her chapbook, Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, won the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize and Chapbook Contest and will be published by Blue Light Press in 2015. Her memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, received a 2013 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. She has also published a children’s book, Chain Letter.
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Storm/Inner Storm
After the tornado that sucked Dorothy to Oz, no one stopped to see what happened to Aunt Em's tidy Kansas world. More whirl than world, as her apron — with scissors in the pocket and darning needles piercing the bodice — lifted off, with the roof, with her felt church hat, also, and the navy crepe dress worn to too many funerals. In their place, a slumgullion of odd debris: a beam, a grocer's box, a crank, an iron wheel. Old photos with faces of strangers stared up at her. Dorothy and Toto gone were, shingles gone, yet left behind one white shoe, a shoe meant for her wedding -- not the one to Henry, but for the wedding that never was. Grief beyond belief. Oh, you want the whole tale of young Em herself, of the missing groom, and the too-soon unblinking baby girl. Well, reach out and turn that crank. As the toothed cogwheel creaks, Em's other pale shoe may return. If you lean in and listen, those soft, sad old slippers may heel-and-toe, and her bitter backstory may reel out — a long-hidden black-and-white film, its cast, its inner tornado, its eternal storm. |
Editor's note: "Storm/Inner Storm" was selected from poems submitted in response to our Ekphrasis Challenge.
You will find the visual prompt on our homepage.
You will find the visual prompt on our homepage.
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Unlaced
This is the last shoe she hid in the attic before the last conjugal visit with her own sanity before the drinking starts before the staggering before language curls like the lip of an angry lover she runs to the garage with the 1967 Thunderbird where the dirt is imbued with rope and diesel and semen there is no priest to deliver last rites the shaman has swallowed his own tongue she climbs outside her bones and knows tomorrow she will be asked to make breakfast in a kitchen that wreaks of crisp bacon |
Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California ( 2005 to 2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Kalliope, Cold Mountain Review, Crab Creek Review, Comstock Review, Slipstream, The Big Muddy, The Pedestal Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review & Valparaiso Poetry Review She won the 2009 Caesura Poetry Award & the Dirty Napkin Cover Prize. Her chapbook, And When the Sun Drops, won the Aurorean Fall 2012 Editor’s Choice award. Her First full length collection, Floodwater, was released in January 2014 by Glass Lyre Press. Floodwater won the Lyrebird Award in 2014.
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Souvenir Corkscrew
These words rub off, bleed faintly in her hand with every twist, a hundred every week. Old tour—a mute ghost ship, mirage island that beckons, winks on a horizon, and then vanishes. Once scarlet cursive, sleek, fine words rub off, bleed faintly in her hand. Each glass she pours, the less she understands of history, the more she rusts, a plump antique. Her tour—a mute ghost ship, mirage island. July blind date in another century? A grand adventure, honeymoon? Perhaps. Now weak, more words rub off, bleed faintly in her hand, a taunting cabernet. She never planned to shatter soapy goblets, slice wet palms, flinch, shriek. Old tour—a mute ghost ship, mirage island each night at table, sink, and bed. How to withstand slow liquid loss of memory? Just speak: All words rub off, bleed faintly in her hand. Her tour—a mute ghost ship, mirage island. |
Kathleen McClung is the author of Almost the Rowboat (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and her work appears in Mezzo Cammin, Unsplendid, Atlanta Review, Bloodroot, Ekphrasis, The Healing Muse, PMS: poemmemoirstory, A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows and Ravens, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Prize, her work was also selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as the national winner of the 2012 poetry contest sponsored by the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, and she has been a finalist for the Morton Marr, Robert Frost, and 49th Parallel poetry prizes. She serves as the sonnet sponsor/judge for the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. She teaches at Skyline College and the Writing Salon and lives in San Francisco. www.kathleenmcclung.com
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Lost Sonnet
It was my fifty-seventh February that winter careened beneath the sky in time lapse streams the way you see the planet curve itself toward spring summer the end of the year only begun bare branches shifted stirred the sky with black spells small birds tittered tunes against the rise and fall a crow landed where he couldn’t hold emblem on twiglets more frail than feet he struggled for balance his dark weight awkward wings askew he flew outsized dismay echoed mine midwinter in the half-started year I stood between sunrise and set and saw these things but never my way through. |
Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, teacher, and editor of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She is the author of Some Odd Afternoon, and two chapbooks. She served as Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, 2011-2013, where she lives in Los Gatos.
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Self-Portrait With Roadside Grave Marker
First, consider the composition: middle quadrant dominated by simple pine cross, white paint already transmogrifying, faith bleached and pocked. In the foreground, plastic roses, picked at by crows, color bled by July sun. Note the depth of field—crossbeams spill shadows on untilled ground. And in the background, blurred by the lens: an orchard, late fruit shriveled. I am the remembered and the one who remembers. I am the cross, I am the shifting soil. Holder of effigies and altars. The note that releases its alphabet to the air. The name has faded, I think it begins with C or M. We may never see it clearly. |
Candace Pearson's poems have been published in fine journals and anthologies nationwide. Her book, Hour of Unfolding, won the 2010 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry from Longwood University. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives in the Los Angeles hills.
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The Dancers
for Lloyd It should have been the way they say it is with swimming: the memory of follow his lead intaglioed on both of my feet. But it wasn’t. It felt—no, I felt alien, the way I felt alien arriving in Nairobi, my african irretrievably lost. When the man held out his hand (and although he smiled his special brand of encouragement), he could see right off: my right and left hips had forgotten each other; my upper body seemed to have lost its acquaintance with my lower gotta dance no matter how hard Motown worked to remind me of the miracle of Smokey who could always turn on the torrid. The man, kind, kept the rhythm and me moving, all the while saying it’s coming back to you, the same way a toothless Kenyan, his fingers stroking his djembe, declared whenever there is any Bantu in your bones, you can never shake it loose |
Lynne Thompson’s latest collection, Start with a Small Guitar, was published by What Books Press in October, 2013. Her first manuscript, Beg No Pardon, won the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review and are forthcoming in the African American Review and Fourteen Hills. Thompson is Reviews & Essays Editor of the California-based poetry journal, Spillway.
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Shopping with Ginsberg
Allen, you asked who killed the pork chops. I only led the lamb to barnyard on his way to becoming mutton. The new moon can pass through a dark sky and still cast shadows. Our dogs sleep quiet till almost dawn, senses pricked for the slightest murmur, the ocean-ward flow of blood through veins and out again, breath back to sky. The lamb waits among his flock, with time to meditate the stillness of bare earth, the weave of wire under a glint of stars. |
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library, 2012) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her latest book is What the Wind Says (Lummox Press, 2013), poems about living and working with her canine search partners over the past 40 years.
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How The Valleys Are Made
A bird might stick to the relative two-dimensionality of backyards during the mid part of the day, when sunlight overexposes flat, sepia hills and they lurk on all sides of us like the topography of the moon. The magpie has seen this all before, preferring the insectine clicks of our elaborate watering devices, grass, occasional snakes, and her own miscellany of small misdeeds until dusk, when she drags her overlong tail like a swimmer up through the thin air of the ravine and commuters at the long red lights note in themselves a small, unaccountable surge of longing, idling, watching her spot of brilliance climb against the fading hills, up towards the last ridge before Hunter Lake or the outer edge of Sparks, above the big gas stations where the westbound freeway crests and Truckee Meadows lies cupped like a hand between ranges. In the last moments of light, see how the city becomes a series of blinking, undulating shadows that call up vegetation or the sea, while above, behind Peavine the sky is a wash from blueblack to yellow and each mountain a black scissorcut open to the void. At the end of dusk a person in a car or a bird with a black and white tail may travel fast enough to see how valleys and ravines are made by the mountains surrounding them, a story of absences and blue light falling down from the sky. Keep moving, magpie says, or you'll get stuck, a pin upon a map. |
Katherine Case is a poet, letterpress printer and former Peace Corps Volunteer whose poetry has appeared in numerous national publications. She owns and operates Meridian Press in Reno, Nevada, where she publishes poetry chapbooks, broadsides and limited-edition prints of her hand-carved, multiple-color linoleum carvings.
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Susan Terris, Southern California
Another Winter’s Tale
devil-bird, its eye flashlit, a chip of ruby fire
— Sylvia Plath, "The Goatsucker"
Night, no lantern, crack of steps on veined leaves.
Check the old script: his life is like this now.
But you must try, once, to walk his maze —
a goat’s serpentine — with no destination ahead,
as he loses names, faces, asked today when you’d
taken out trash: “Where the hell were you?”
Here you are both blind and circling in shadow.
Words have lost weight and sense. Doors slam,
doors that don't have frames or walls. This stage
has a proscenium but no curtain. Wings blur. . .
Chased off, his life is in the wings now. You turn,
push toward light, yet enter pursued by a bear.
devil-bird, its eye flashlit, a chip of ruby fire
— Sylvia Plath, "The Goatsucker"
Night, no lantern, crack of steps on veined leaves.
Check the old script: his life is like this now.
But you must try, once, to walk his maze —
a goat’s serpentine — with no destination ahead,
as he loses names, faces, asked today when you’d
taken out trash: “Where the hell were you?”
Here you are both blind and circling in shadow.
Words have lost weight and sense. Doors slam,
doors that don't have frames or walls. This stage
has a proscenium but no curtain. Wings blur. . .
Chased off, his life is in the wings now. You turn,
push toward light, yet enter pursued by a bear.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Sacramento, California
Farmer’s Market
September 16, 2001
We caught the scent of fresh lavender wands
used for calming, along with the pervasive aroma
of basil, the spiced fern whiffs of dill, the mix
of peaches and torpedo onions, and later,
at the crowded end of the aisles, the seawater
pungency of fish, mostly salmon. The glazed
eyes of the fish stared out blankly from their beds
of crushed ice. We gazed seriously into one, unable
to penetrate the isinglass surface where our own
faces floated, like trilobites in stone. Even the roses
"not hothouse" but grown indoors in a family garden
(laminated photos as proof in the vendor's stall)
could not enliven the crowd's quiet mood, most
of us still tuned to the week of TV, those images
of the burning towers, the planes vanishing into
them, and the fragmented verbiage of officials.
In blue jeans, in saris, in Sunday church clothes,
in wheelchairs, in strollers, we jostled and buffeted—
speaking English, Tagalog, Spanish, Mandarin, Farsi,
bumping hips, knocking elbows cordially, wedging
ourselves peacefully in, to search for the ripest local
honeydew, the fattest Big Boys, the plumpest figs.
Sandra Anfang, Petaluma, California
Task
Walking to figure-drawing class
on 57th Street in 1968,
upended on the sidewalk
a perfect batch of brownies
cut-glass platter for a roof
my heart in tatters.
My feet bolted to concrete
indifferent people pass in clusters
others wagging like bobble heads
in a silent tsk tsk.
I kneel in for a closer look,
finger the sharp Steuben pattern,
still pristine.
Years later it hits me
like a cannonball, the gesture of giving
and what came before:
the exclamation point of idea.
I comb the streets, a symbol junkie
still stooping to salvage the metaphor.
Walking to figure-drawing class
on 57th Street in 1968,
upended on the sidewalk
a perfect batch of brownies
cut-glass platter for a roof
my heart in tatters.
My feet bolted to concrete
indifferent people pass in clusters
others wagging like bobble heads
in a silent tsk tsk.
I kneel in for a closer look,
finger the sharp Steuben pattern,
still pristine.
Years later it hits me
like a cannonball, the gesture of giving
and what came before:
the exclamation point of idea.
I comb the streets, a symbol junkie
still stooping to salvage the metaphor.
Alexa Mergen, Sacramento, California.
The Cenote at Night
cenote: a natural underground reservoir of water found among limestone cliffs
I slide into the blue hole along
limestone cliffs
mossed slippery green.
Above, bats find mosquitoes
in dim lamp glow.
I am chilled swimming alone.
Nine carp tickle the moon skin
of my thighs.
Am I frightened? Am I
frightened floating the surface
of the deep?
No, I’m fearless moth-light.
And stars unfasten one by
one to stud
the agate sky--
cenote: a natural underground reservoir of water found among limestone cliffs
I slide into the blue hole along
limestone cliffs
mossed slippery green.
Above, bats find mosquitoes
in dim lamp glow.
I am chilled swimming alone.
Nine carp tickle the moon skin
of my thighs.
Am I frightened? Am I
frightened floating the surface
of the deep?
No, I’m fearless moth-light.
And stars unfasten one by
one to stud
the agate sky--
Kim Shuck, San Francisco, California
In the Walnut Grove
That year the wind took the
Topsoil and the children the
Maps all changed and not
Everyone found a pair of
Magical shoes or good
Company I wonder if she paused
Every time she introduced herself if it
Was a question between her teeth as well the
Taproots that go somewhere
Unknown and we understand that
Every family has stories that are
Painted over there are always
Things hidden in the walls but when all you
Know is the blank wall and the
Hints and suggestions of what might be in there and you
Know, know that all of the expected
Family portraits are in ink only
Visible under a certain moon
That year the wind took the
Topsoil and the children the
Maps all changed and not
Everyone found a pair of
Magical shoes or good
Company I wonder if she paused
Every time she introduced herself if it
Was a question between her teeth as well the
Taproots that go somewhere
Unknown and we understand that
Every family has stories that are
Painted over there are always
Things hidden in the walls but when all you
Know is the blank wall and the
Hints and suggestions of what might be in there and you
Know, know that all of the expected
Family portraits are in ink only
Visible under a certain moon
Cathy Barber, San Mateo, California
One Line May Hide Another
After Kenneth Koch
There is a line
hidden behind this one.
A poem in the space
between ink and paper,
that peeks around the tall letters,
squats behind the fat ones,
puts a large googly eye
to an ‘O’ and stares.
But just like watched pots,
it’s hard to catch the act, the moment
when a word or thought
shows itself unobscured.
The poem behind
rarely makes the brave, incautious move.
Oh, it will poke out a toe,
a word here and there.
From around ‘alligator’ might come
‘alleged’ and from behind ‘cushion’
‘choice’ may flash, first in shadow,
then in a mad leap to the front.
Once ‘desert’ was replaced
with ‘daughter’ and that shook me.
But another time I wrote a poem
with the word ‘death’ right in it,
and the idea of death, too,
not just the word.
This was a serious poem
that would have scared anyone,
even you, if you had read it,
and it wasn’t about you, not really.
That word ‘death’ was overtaken in a flash.
A huge word pushed its way in,
squeezed that space wide.
When I looked next morning,
all my words were gone.
A lovely verse about hummingbirds
covered the page
and I couldn’t remember
much mine had said,
just that it wasn’t about you.
I keep that bird poem close at hand.
Sometimes I bring my mouth close,
whisper around the words on the page.
I coax my lines to reappear,
tell them I would try hard
to welcome their return.
After Kenneth Koch
There is a line
hidden behind this one.
A poem in the space
between ink and paper,
that peeks around the tall letters,
squats behind the fat ones,
puts a large googly eye
to an ‘O’ and stares.
But just like watched pots,
it’s hard to catch the act, the moment
when a word or thought
shows itself unobscured.
The poem behind
rarely makes the brave, incautious move.
Oh, it will poke out a toe,
a word here and there.
From around ‘alligator’ might come
‘alleged’ and from behind ‘cushion’
‘choice’ may flash, first in shadow,
then in a mad leap to the front.
Once ‘desert’ was replaced
with ‘daughter’ and that shook me.
But another time I wrote a poem
with the word ‘death’ right in it,
and the idea of death, too,
not just the word.
This was a serious poem
that would have scared anyone,
even you, if you had read it,
and it wasn’t about you, not really.
That word ‘death’ was overtaken in a flash.
A huge word pushed its way in,
squeezed that space wide.
When I looked next morning,
all my words were gone.
A lovely verse about hummingbirds
covered the page
and I couldn’t remember
much mine had said,
just that it wasn’t about you.
I keep that bird poem close at hand.
Sometimes I bring my mouth close,
whisper around the words on the page.
I coax my lines to reappear,
tell them I would try hard
to welcome their return.
Chantè McCormick, San Francisco, California
August
My sister remembers that I used to jump along
Rooftops at our apartment complex. She is
Exaggerating, and I wanted to say at the time--
Jumping isn’t the same as fleeing. I looked at her
Disbelieving that I could have flung myself, but I imagine
Whatever she saw was me younger, Lee Press On Nails, some
Curved claws valley girl high vigilante feathered hair
Biting my skin. I was the contortionist burrowing underground.
Amazing that I was a beacon to her while wanting
To rub my way under the tarmac on the roof, crawl inside the dark ink,
Fingers dragging the slick heels of what must have been
An awful summer. My ankles sticking to the only abandon I can remember,
And for years now I’ve watched the witch inside turn to the sun she must have seen.
My sister remembers that I used to jump along
Rooftops at our apartment complex. She is
Exaggerating, and I wanted to say at the time--
Jumping isn’t the same as fleeing. I looked at her
Disbelieving that I could have flung myself, but I imagine
Whatever she saw was me younger, Lee Press On Nails, some
Curved claws valley girl high vigilante feathered hair
Biting my skin. I was the contortionist burrowing underground.
Amazing that I was a beacon to her while wanting
To rub my way under the tarmac on the roof, crawl inside the dark ink,
Fingers dragging the slick heels of what must have been
An awful summer. My ankles sticking to the only abandon I can remember,
And for years now I’ve watched the witch inside turn to the sun she must have seen.
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milking
because my grandfather seeded as many women as fields, these dark half-uncles roping and whistling in the pasture are strangers with my father’s face, their eyes shaped the same for squinting, hands fat with muscle. they show me how to pull the rope taut around the beast’s horns, ignore the bellows and heave. squatting on a wooden box Payín with the silver teeth talks me through the milking, long unused to intimacy my hands shake on the teats. I press my face against her warmth while in the pen her baby cries with hunger. when the milk threatens to spill Payín pours, hands me a bottle and tells me to feed Benito, a red calf born six days ago. his mom’s udder is filled only with pus and blood, they say she is no good for breeding, when Lent is over she will be sent to slaughter. I’ll be home by then, far away from this rocky place of the cross where my father was born. when Benito finishes his bottle, I give him three fingers to suck, his tongue as long as my hand, something in me leaps at the unfamiliar heat of a soft hungry mouth, new mammal eyes. at the other side of the pen Payín and another uncle force long hollow needles into the bad teats, trying to drain the infection. the cow rolls her eyes towards me and moans, long and low. there isn’t anything that can be done but wait and see if her body swings back to what she was made for. when she is drained I release Benito, he runs to his mama, he butts his head against her, bleating, he sucks and sucks but she is dry. on the ride back to the ranch I sit in the back of the truck with the milk, my uncles telling me how like my grandfather I am, the type of person who prefers sky and field to walls, I agree though if I lived here I would have long ago been sent to slaughter.
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Lizz Huerta, San Diego, California |
Kristen Orser, Santa Cruz, California
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excerpt from "Little Trill Goes to Sheep"
Unreadable engine, what is a good time for bells? Depending on point of view, start again in completely different alphabets: the baby imagines a word for sun, my stacked heartbeat. Collected phrases from before sleep. The jawbone doesn’t want to be dramatic. A word comes when biting apples. Of course swallow it, morning will come, all ready, arranged with belief in the body inside my body. Blue shaped bottle washed to shore. In the beginning I hummed a love song and fell through fully open sound. |
Connie Post, SF Bay Area, CA.
Ancestor Who Finds Me in a Dream
There are stories
like fields
you must fall inside
to get to the wide blue river
where the sacrament of water
waits
you bend your knees
until the sky breaks
and find currents –
your own
pull the water
like amniotic fluid
into a ceramic bowl
a cavern of self
as you walk back
Italy’s own boot
folds at the weight
of your steps
as you walk back
there is a village waiting
like an outstretched hand
filling you
like the river you just left
filling you as if
there was no other earth
and behind you
all those stories
you dropped
like holy water
along the way.
There are stories
like fields
you must fall inside
to get to the wide blue river
where the sacrament of water
waits
you bend your knees
until the sky breaks
and find currents –
your own
pull the water
like amniotic fluid
into a ceramic bowl
a cavern of self
as you walk back
Italy’s own boot
folds at the weight
of your steps
as you walk back
there is a village waiting
like an outstretched hand
filling you
like the river you just left
filling you as if
there was no other earth
and behind you
all those stories
you dropped
like holy water
along the way.
Dana Koster, Central Valley, California
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Scouting
When the girls search for birds they find only owl pellets, tight balls of bone they bury with trowels. A dutiful concealment, this childhood of funerals: the ecstatic and the foul. Bees that stung them moments before entombed in a shoebox, shrouded in towels. They uncover what it means to bury, if what fills the shovel suppresses the howl. |
Arisa White, Oakland, California.
Long-distance call to Guyana
Speakers cannot speak you sharper than these decades cloud.
Your accent aged and grave and so I listen with my body
to earth. What the kneecaps didn’t get, I’m sure temples stand
under the rainforest in your yard. I’m sure the sternum unlocks
this truth, already split in us. Your tongue is not mother and has
given up its pearl. We language the leaving and it’s static between us.
Speakers cannot speak you sharper than these decades cloud.
Your accent aged and grave and so I listen with my body
to earth. What the kneecaps didn’t get, I’m sure temples stand
under the rainforest in your yard. I’m sure the sternum unlocks
this truth, already split in us. Your tongue is not mother and has
given up its pearl. We language the leaving and it’s static between us.