Hillary Gravendyk

First Minute, After Days

Quarter-light tips in.

A room shaped like a mismatched trio of brackets.

Each bend or angle bristling with other lights.

Drunken or weary. Lost or left.

In one bracket a chair. Dark monitor.

Disorder on a blacker field.

Someone’s hands bound loosely down.

Skein of plastic braided into the mouth.

One hand charred black and almost

Black, a color like green. Wait—Mine.

Then I was lost in a stranger sound. Quarter-light tips out.

A machine gasps in surprise.

Throat closed by what opens inside it.

Waiting

Spun sky, unhappy stairway. Stark record of summer: bright, harrowing. But it wasn’t the brink. It was an uneven surface, was a jumble of absences. They waited for me in the sycamore shade. Violet current, stuttering eye. Watching me disappear by degrees. You pressed my shoulder, held it to the wheel. And I haven’t even told you what I fear most, what’s buried in the flesh. Selfish desire, I kept you like a secret. Wanted what I could get. We built a boat from all this, set it adrift in the tarpaper night. Mended my skin with barbed-wire. Covered ourselves in refusal. I forced your hand into mine, though I knew you couldn’t go where I had to go.

Myra Dutton

Doomsday

Now children think they have five years to live.
Stacks of worry lines crease their young brows.
They say, “Bees are dying, glaciers are melting,
and islands have been swallowed by the sea.
Every day one hundred species become extinct.
Each day there is increasing war and greed.
We wake to hear––No more Swallowtails.
Butterflies are the first to go.
Our world will never be the same.
The revenge of Gaia is upon us.”
Their young shoulders sag as they walk
past the people they once believed in,
and the children know––No one has the answer.
It seems like two hundred years since I was a child,
trained to hide in case of nuclear attack––to hide
under my desk, under God, in bomb shelters, in basements,
my mouth covered with a hankie, a pan on my head.
All anyone needed was a year’s supply of Campbell’s Soup.
Chicken Noodle and Creamy Tomato would save the world.
It was a well-kept secret that no one had the answer.

It seems like two hundred years since I believed
that humanity was innately good, that it cared
for all countries, all peoples, all beings,
that it cared if waters were pure, the air unpolluted,
and the land lush, green, and toxin-free.
What can I possibly say to the young idealist,
undaunted, who demands integrity from everyone?
Am I to say that times have changed?
… that two hundred years have passed
since I believed in mankind.
Or can I say that I am learning to trust?
… that even from this chaos and disorder,
good will rise, that it always does,
given enough time.

Alaina Bixon

Powder Blue Skirt

Powder blue skirt
loose
willowy
billowing
diaphanous.

Cirrus clouds, stirred.
Blue of late afternoon sky in November
after raking leaves.

Better on a hanger than defined by its wearer
Possible flutterings, delicate lines
Like the branches of those bare autumn trees
A day whose color I never saw again.

Cynthia Anderson

The I-10

Born in 1897, a San Bernardino native son,
my grandfather lived to be 100. Late in life,
when we would take him out for a drive,
he would point to some shopping mall
off the I-10 and say, We used to hunt
rabbits there.

When he retired from title insurance,
he had a farm in Cherry Valley,
fruit trees and eggs. Then, in Yucaipa,
he looked after my grandmother
who hung on 22 years after a crippling
stroke, with a will to live she learned
as an only child in Randsburg,
where her father worked for the mines.

Time and again, I would drive down the coast,
pick up the I-10 in Santa Monica,
take it straight through the polluted heart
of L.A. to the hinterlands, find my way
to the Yucaipa house by memory,
never using a map, never thinking
about how much the freeway
had changed the land in its short life.

My grandfather spent his last days
in a convalescent hospital in Riverside.
He remembered when the palm trees
along on Magnolia Drive were planted,
recalled Sunday drives before the first
world war. He and my grandmother are buried
in Desert Lawn, hardly a resting place,
the I-10 a noisy witness to the end
of their lives and the world they knew.

Cynthia Anderson lives in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Her award-winning poems have appeared in journals such as Askew, Dark Matter, Apercus Quarterly, Whale Road, Knot Magazine, and Origami Poems Project. She is the author of five collections—”In the Mojave,” “Desert Dweller,” “Mythic Rockscapes,” and “Shared Visions I” and “Shared Visions II.” She frequently collaborates with her husband, photographer Bill Dahl. Cynthia co-edited the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens.

Cynthia Anderson

Blackbush

Whatever I look at stays with me
long after the looking is over.

Lying in bed, I close my eyes
and see the blackbush I pulled
from the ground this morning.

They came up easily,
brittle wood breaking in my hands,
the pieces added to a growing pile.

The drought has done them in.
They could feed a wildfire,
send flames twenty feet high—
so it’s a matter of clearing.

The way those gray sticks rise
beneath my eyelids, it’s as though
they want to be remembered—

Like ancestors who hold on
because they cannot do otherwise.

Cynthia Anderson

Shadow of a Hawk

The flank of the mountain
is filled with lupine—
unexpected, the largest stand yet.
Bright afternoon sun
lights the purple slope,
where the hawk’s shadow
glides like a dark window
between this world and the next.
Some will not make it
through this day, shattering
at the sharp fall of the predator.
The survivors will flee, hide,
then emerge despite
the nature of chance.
Every sliver of life glitters
against that black background.

Nancy Scott Campbell

pass the salt

so I examine the grains pure
and bridal white though
forced together by more than convention
I imagine molecules
bonded by initial electro-wrench
somehow all at peace among themselves
waiting to be shaken
darkly dissolved or
as some would suggest divorced

beyond our crystal shaker I picture
the life cycle of salt
a vast residue flat and
leisurely forsaken by perhaps a lake
dregs left to etch this nude swath of desert

heat vertical blur of earth
hoards a body’s brine
parched the human reservoir for tears
dry breath holds a blind sky
no horizon
here no creature grazes
no plant can be seen by a mind looking
for anything ground breaking
such as a formula making clear
secrets of together

Marcyn Clements

Chaparral Ballet

A hummingbird sat quietly on the dead limb of a torrey pine
half burnt by the fire that ran so hot it only took part of the tree

and raced on. A Kingbird unseats the little bird, cocking
his head back and forth looking for larvae or beetles

who come in after a disaster like this and feast on the oozing sap.
The hummingbird swept down to the sage, still blooming by year’s

end and fed in its velvet ears.

Michael J. Cluff

A Royal Raven Near Corona

From the halogen lamp
In the community college parking lot
You look down upon me,
Imperious and coldly correct.
I am never your subject,
Despite what you know.
Avian avarice drives you out.
The choker of inorganic consumption
Compels me sideways
Into another cinderblock stalag
nee Norco College.

You live by caprices;
I, by complicated equations.
Yet the sun still glares
For us both…
Maybe a bit less
For me than, I suspect,
I know
For you.

Rachelle Cruz

Notes On the Round of Return
2/18/11 9:19 pm, Riverside, CA

after Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi and Romeo Cruz

Last night I fought cobwebs from my eyes / Last night ‘the House strips funding from Planned Parenthood’

Pearl Square Bahrain/ Tahir Square Egypt / Madison Wisconsin / rained faces call for more than a word /change to land on

The song of mouths / Coyotes yowl outside near the 60 freeway/ I click the button / type my name address email phone number / forward to others / Read/ Write/ Read / The song of mouths

This mouth / Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi / A prison is not always a fence and a metal door / It might even be spacious, unbounded…

Prison Is / Prison Is /In Cairo / a father’s left eye blind / his son / a voice crackling against the prison of sky and silence / In Riverside / Silence in the hallways / Silence in the notebook / The freeway rumbles on…

Prison might be an eyelid with dark lashes that we close and tuck under the skin / as we ruminate a dream of life in silences / and hiddeness.

I am singing his round of return / his papyrus song /As if a voice of some kind were calling / My father sends me a poem about Egypt / the father I write about who writes me

Will their cries be more dire/ than their muzzein up that mosque that calls the millions to prayer / to kneel and bow to the ground / looking to the East?

My father’s hand writing / breathing into a Naga sunset window / signs carried above earth to the sky / In Manila / crying Marcos Down! / the night yellow with tear gas / My father’s hands stained / the ink from newspapers he wrote / I am writing this / he has written this / we will write / As if a voice of some kind were calling

Another pharaoh fell to the ground / like the crows but still the pyramids stood mocking us / that we should hold the ground / otherwise they will come tumbling down / if we keep talking of new ideas