Tag: California

Dear California by Eileen Pettycrew

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Dear California

          after the fires

Yesterday I passed a utility pole plastered
with leaflets so old they formed a dress

the color of fog, and I thought of you, my California,
the way you used to be, your chain-reaction pileups

on old highway 99 and two-hour school delays,
your fog a room in which I could hide,

my hands gone, my feet gone,
your sun hung on a clothesline to dry.

Now you are my faraway sorrow,
reaching so high with your mirror and smoke

I can’t tell if you’re still breathing,
California; I have no advice to give.

Birds fly over your great valley
but they cannot stop the wind.

For you, I choose a black dress,
the hem taking on dust. A straw hat

with the brim pulled low and sandals
made of ash. California, I travel anywhere

but still I find you, your tricks and magic,
your small noise through the wires.

*

Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall, ONE ART, SWWIM Every Day, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Blue Heron Review, and elsewhere. In 2022 she was one of two runners-up for the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry and a finalist for the New Letters Award for Poetry. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at Pacific University. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

Slump by Emily Lake Hansen

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Slump

In California they named misfortune,
blamed everything on the sweltering
Santa Ana, the off-year winds
that carried dry heat into October.
The year they were worst, I was 9
and I sat in the backyard for hours
fanning myself with schoolbooks.
Lizards scurried on the hot cement,
and I watched the dog chase them,
their tails lollipop sticks protruding
from his mouth. Here I’m at a loss
for what to call it: the record heat
that killed the clover, that browned
resilient moss. Our dog lays out
on what’s left of the grass. Is there
a name I can give this slumping?
Last night I fell to the floor
and couldn’t move. I touched
my face tenderly — nothing else
to do — pressed my hands like ice
to the hurting spaces of my body.

*

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled writer and the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, CALYX, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, So to Speak, SWWIM, and The South Carolina Review among others. Emily lives in Atlanta where she is Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech.

Summer Arithmetic by Molly Fisk

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Summer Arithmetic

What else can I tell you?
It’s September now and the fire
started by a burning car
that grew to 50 acres six miles
from my door was contained
overnight. There have only been
two days of real smoke —
it’s confusing facing another lucky
blue morning. Fire season once began
in autumn, not June, not May.
We are waiting for the coming
destruction. We are practicing regret,
and terror, our bodies adrenalized
even in sleep. Now the news is
smoke will kill us in a few years,
First Responders earliest, no
dispensation for the work
of salvation. Meanwhile, laundry
dries on the line, tomatoes ripen.

*

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Fisk, who lives in the Sierra foothills, has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

One Poem by Craig Cotter

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I KNEW YOU WERE HERE

I’ve been watching large trees
move in LA breezes—
80 feet high—pine, fir, palm.
They call me about my death.
I’m not frightened but don’t want to go.
Their leaves and needles wave at me
like stars on Potrero Beach, Costa Rica.
I’d rubbed Michael’s feet. He left.
I sat alone with a Pacific bay to myself.
Mosquitos feasted.
*
I would prefer the trees not call me,
I’m 60 and would like 40 more years.
But especially this one 80-foot pine in Glendale
says my time is up.
It waves against a grey sky.
*
I’ve known since I was a child that trees are conscious.
Souls connect without bodies.
“I knew you were here!” Alex said to me once
when I’d arrived in New York from LA
without telling him.
*
The palm and fir called me to death tonight.
They communicate “soon.”
They show reflected in moon and street light.
Some idiot had the 90-foot fir across the street
trimmed last week. Butchered.
Another neighbor paid $5000 to have his California live-oak trimmed 3 years ago
so more light would get to his backyard so he could grow grass.
Freeway noise and dust filled my apartment.
But it all grew back in 8 months.
His backyard still dust.
But this fir and me—he will survive—
tells me I will not.
*
I hope their sense of time is different than mine.
Maybe “soon” for a tree is 40 years.
The lawyer who bought my childhood house in Michigan
cut down my favorite oak—not a limb until 60 feet off the ground—
because he didn’t like raking its leaves in the fall.
Same for the sugar maple in the front yard
and 2 shag-bark hickories in the back.
The oak was at least 180-years-old.
The maple my dad and I planted as a sapling in 1967—
nine years later its canopy filled our entire front yard with shade.
*
I watch a pine in Glendale through the window
as my colleagues work at their computers.
Its message clear and irrefutable:
my time is up.
But why would trees call me to death?
They wave me gracefully off the Earth.
*
I knew on Potrero Beach I was moving further into the universe.
Michael’s feet were so beautiful
and no one had ever rubbed them before.
He was a guard at Sugar Beach.
We hid behind beach chairs close to the shore.
He carried a radio to communicate with the other guards,
turned down the volume.
*
I look out and my time is young and unchanged;
I look in and know the trees are telling me the truth.
***
Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Great Lakes Review, Hawai’i Review, & Tampa Review. His fourth book of poems, After Lunch with Frank O’Hara, is currently available on Amazon. www.craigcotter.com