Tag: Eileen Pettycrew

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.

Two Poems by Eileen Pettycrew

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I Couldn’t Do What the Pedicure Lady Does

All day bending toward disagreeable
outcroppings, operating
with a surgeon’s precision—
especially not the way she does it,
always trying to catch my eye,
while I, already squirming
from the intimacy of the procedure,
try to stay inside
the separate station of my book.

I think of feet, how they tether me
to this world, how one day
they’ll be reduced to nothing,
and she will no longer take them,
naked as mole rats,
into her hands, rubbing the heels
and between the toes
with her lotioned fingers.

Now as I wait for the polish to dry,
she sweeps nail clippings
and clumps of skin into a dustpan.
Someday everything in this salon
will be gone—fake poinsettia wreath
on the door, the oversized calendar
printed with Bui’s Natural Tofu.
Box fan in the corner ruffling
a strand of my hair.

I think seven years into the future,
when my skin will have renewed itself.
I like to think I’ll reinvent myself
with whatever warmth
she carries in her hands
as she kneads my calves,
her fists pounding look up, look up.

*

First Week in April

Already the azaleas
are in bloom, the rhodies
busting out too.
Everything’s moved
up a month, as if time
has rolled up the rug
and left town. What will
happen to the Mother’s Day
rhododendron show?
Maybe folks will learn to love
the delicate skeletons
left behind.
          Last night
at the square dance, I loved
others’ attire—window-pane
fishnets, a hot-pink shirt.
I slid into do-si-dos,
swing your partner.
I think of my father’s
artificial hips, how he quit
dancing for fear
of falling. He and my mother
out on the floor,
suede soles gliding
across the wood as if
they could go on forever.
          I think I know
of loss, but I don’t.
Or it’s been here so long
it seems normal,
like browned-out grass.
The days
mean something,
don’t they?
Rising as they do
when the sun returns
after a cloudburst.
Fleeting as steam.

* 

Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall, SWWIM Every Day, 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. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Kohl’s Jewelry Counter by Eileen Pettycrew

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At Kohl’s Jewelry Counter

I want to put them on myself
my mother said of the clip-ons
she beheld like a glittering prophecy,
while I held her purse thick with Kleenex
and the aches and pains of the old.
But she struggled to slide the earrings
onto her lobes and close the clips,
letting them hang halfway, barely,
like spent seed pods,
and the small oh that escaped her mouth
each time one slipped off
was like the faint coo of a distant dove,
as if she had flown toward a horizon
beyond the foothills, and I was alone
on a dirt road listening
for her call. She taught me
how to feel sorry for people,
call them poor things,
like the stocky girl in my class who wore
a miniskirt and knee-high boots,
her thighs like bread dough.
Earrings of loss
falling to the floor, and me,
my mother’s only witness,
the familiar bag of pity ballooning
in my chest, crowding out
anything else I might have felt.

*

Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall, SWWIM Every Day, 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. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.