Archive

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.

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.

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.

R achel 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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--

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

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.

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.

Chantè McCormick, San Francisco, California

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.

Sorry for All the Times

Again without warning, I have a baby
girl. I have given birth
but I hardly remember the pain. It seems

so strange that we have this child, and unexpectedly. Maybe
we have adopted her. I let her suckle, hoping
my milk will let down, as I’ve heard it can, to see

if that will work. But of course my milk lets down--
that’s right. I carried her. She begins to nurse--
it feels good, and it hurts.

By the second day, she is talking in sentences. I try
to impress upon her father how amazing this is, how
extraordinary. Yes, yes, people boast about their children,

but this—this is different, this is truly a feat. I cannot believe
my good fortune. My child is a person who would not have been
otherwise, she is a person and more important

to me than anyone, ever. I feel sorry for all the times
she came to me, suddenly, like now
and how I felt no joy, only burdened, nearly

crushed. This time, I understand—my daughter is someone
I can know, I know I have known her for a long time. No, no,
not only some idea of her, but her. This child. This one.

Krista Lukas,
Riverside, California

Lizz Huerta, San Diego, California

excerpt from "Little Trill Goes to Sheep"

Kristen Orser, Santa Cruz, California

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.

Dana Koster, Central Valley, California

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.

YOUR CART

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excerpt from "Little Trill Goes to Sheep"