:: Judith Skillman :: Christianne Balk :: Nanette Rayman Rivera ::
Featured Poets
Cobblestone Streets by Judith Skillman
Made for trouble,
meant to slow things down.
Narrow alleys,
lines of laundry to reel in,
a language smelling of garlic and gutturals.
Colors, scents, and secrets.
The street will not tell,
the map will not get you found.
These cars, these houses—
look now, none of them are yours.
Admit you are lost.
That you came from Europe
and can’t remember when or why.
Perhaps there was a war.
A girl, barely a woman,
smiled at a man.
Skimpy clothes were thrown down,
right there, on the stones.
The moon was slim.
The earth was a flat plate, an offering
still full of fish and Tarsiers.
Someone had died of drink.
A pillar of stones for memory,
flowers piled in a cairn.
(August, 1870)
The winds tear through Merced
Canyon’s boulder-choked gorge,
stampedes muddy Moss Creek.
Hoofed catastropes! I’ll ride them all
crouched in these root-caves, surrounded
by the purple-tinged bark of buttressed
trunks in an unnamed grove. I’m tired
of tales of the ground’s cataclysmic quakes -
valleys bottomed out, pine trees tossed,
cedar, oak, gusts snapping massive limbs,
and the sudden rush of flame -
fires grazing these old,
close-packed leaves. Spinning, zigzagging,
burning back, surging, scorching every living
thing. Roaring updrafts filling branches filled
with cones. Ashes settling, smoking litter cooling
stumps, blackened hollows
and from this loud storm drifts
chestnut snow, down from the quiet
canopy, each fleck smaller than a grain
of flax, a cloud of hope released from tight
of small, still, flat-winged Sequoia seeds.
On the muraled front
of the dusty bodega, sky patterns
up like gray shrimp. A man in belly tattoos
sells pastilles and honey marallo to grandmas,
their long braids detouring down gnarled backs,
and clouds hug the occasional tree
like a spark plugged into the ruined dawn.
I prefer the rain. The rain answers.
When you lie awake all night watching
stars, and wonder if your father’s
coming home, and you startle
as your mother says, A bed of leaves,
a cardboard box, it’s all the same.
Never mind the virgules,
then, rain is comfort,
rain is the flat
embrace of nothing.
Yesterday I woke to the aroma
of hacked wood, fresh sap, grass shredded.
swarm on paper-wrapped roses out front
Men tasting green phlegm eating from dumpsters.
Today I step between raindrops.
