Tag: fires

Dear California by Eileen Pettycrew

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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.

Summer Arithmetic by Molly Fisk

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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.