Tag: LA fires

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.

Quiet Cup by Jennifer Abod

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Quiet Cup
Day after the LA Fire started (January 2025)

This morning, the wide plastic, ugly gray lid on the industrial garbage can in the alley outside my kitchen window is blocking my quiet morning view: high polled wires in an open sky, lush green trees in the distance. The apartment owner next door put a lock on the lid after the fire a few weeks ago that woke Winnie, the dog, who woke my stepdaughter in her upstairs apartment at four AM. By the time she alerted me, she had called the fire department. I watched them in the dark as they tried to stop the flames rising to our roof. I couldn’t help imagining the person who did it, someone who can’t take care of himself, who yells at himself on street corners, leaves empty 7-Eleven cups in our parkway grass, deciding to just do something. I drink coffee looking at the burnt pile of vine branches and lifeless leaves on our charred wood fence, march determinedly to the back-alley, slam shut the lid, return to the house hoping the person who lit the fire finds something else to do.

*

Jennifer Abod is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, radio broadcaster and jazz singer. She is a former assistant professor of Communications and Women’s Studies. Her poems appear in One Art Journal, The Metro Washington Weekly, Silver Birch Press, Sinister Wisdom, Wild Crone Wisdom, Artemis Journal, Fruitslice, Discretionary Love, Persimmon Tree and are forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, James Crew’s Love Anthology, Vita and the Woolf. www.jenniferabod.com