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INFO CLASSES VISITING WRITERS LINKS STUDENT WRITING ENGLISH DEPT.
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Poetry
- Berkeley by Cathy Che
- Harvest by Krista Hanson
- The Kiss by John Bower
- Return by Samia Rahimtoola
- The Seine at Argenteuil by Kate Peebles
- Speaking To The Mirror by Joey Rubin
- ‘Work of Mourning' by Elyse Fenton
- MISSOULA by Mackenzie Cole
- Mud Roads by Chalcey Wilding
- Gift by Chalcey Wilding
Berkeley
Curled on the closet dresser, I clutch the phone.
Dust rushes up, towards the light bulb, then slows.
Water keeps whining through the pipes. My voice a whisper
underwater and sinking. I haven't opened my mouth
in days. I clear my throat hard,
You ask about the weather, what I ate
for lunch, how is school,
and I watch the fishy open-close
of my lips in the mirror.
and every word begins to scratch
rust from my throat, and something begins
to leak, a valve releases, and my voice spills out.
Mother, don't leave me here, folded up
with a single bulb, dresser, mirror,
words flooding the floor, waist-deep,
and not knowing what
to shut off.
~Cathy Che
Harvest
In the pew ahead of us a new father takes up not his baby
but his baby's blanket, rubs the cloth between his fingers
while his wife without a word takes their crying baby away.
I imagine she wants to relieve the congregation of this infant voice.
I want to tell her: Stay with the father, keep close
as stalks of wheat bound together form a sheaf.
We came not to thwart the harvest,
nor to silence.
After Mass your living room holds after-Mass
light. It turns the light-brown walls golden
like wheat. We lie on your couch,
curled and bound like two grains
in the head of a stalk. Your head is planted
on my hip so when you speak
your voice reverberates
through skirt and skin to my bone
where I hear you.
I imagine this is what the father wanted:
to keep the cries by his side, though
he settled for hearing with his hands.
I want to remember us like this:
eyes closed, the ears of our bones open,
your head on my hip, your hands folded
as they were atop the pew.
Our bodies, a luminous cradle.
~Krista Hanson
The Kiss
Her tongue
in his mouth
felt like a hot slug.
And all he could think about
was when he used to microwave insects.
Termites made this sizzle, right
before they exploded.
He couldn't really remember what slugs did'
but boll weevils
didn't do anything,
they just walked around,
didn't notice the difference.
Just then, he wanted his tongue
to be a boll weevil.
~John Bower
Return
I return to a childhood that
is a canyon of sage & dead women.
I have opened up one accidental
day. Mother thinks her clothes
are snakes & she rips them from
her in a rage. They don't look
like snakes, though they do writhe
& coil on the hot ground.
I think of asking her now
what it was that made her do that
then. I feel a dark sea gaining in
my own heart. I want to know it,
to know if it is the sea she then felt,
if these are the currents she mistook
for a snake's insidious winding.
I won't ask her. I never ask her
& I never tell her that I return to
all these nights, as if by chance,
I return to those other nights
when nothing made sense
except the heat of a LA summer
& that wicked desire to strip
to nothing, to disappear into a
dark street wearing nothing,
taking nothing with you—leaving
clothes, daughter, your past
entirely behind you, finally
wishing to become something
anything of your own.
~ Samia Rahimtoola
The Seine at Argenteuil
Oil on Canvas, Auguste Renoir
This is a day clearly
of white canvas triangles
that float in the river.
Float
in and above
the water.
This world consists of nothing
but strings of light
whose tones disrobe
like notes from a violin,
and lie back, flat
on the river.
The isosceles breathe blue wind,
obstruct the sky,
and slant their shape against it
like fins,
a kiss of angles
in the absence of angels.
At first glance the eyes
intersect
with the back
of a man in brown. Connect, but cannot
pass through him. At this point
he stands
at the end of a thin plank
like a word on the tip of a wooden tongue.
Never said. A word that stares
at passing summer faces
before they slip,
shift liquidly
and leave their trace behind
in pastel streaks
on the water.
He watches the peach smudge
of a boy in his boat
as it slinks near the dock Near,
never nearer than the width
of its own shadow,
the boat
is stuck in its nearness like a stare.
And he is stuck in his stare,
unaware of other eyes,
other faces that hang
always behind him,
watch him as he watches –
how long can you look
at one shape, spliced
as it is, on the horizon? Long enough to measure
the repeated outline of obsession –
the blanched skin of half-wings
that never fly
but skim the surface
of a tremble. And so,
the sky lies down on the river
and closes its eyes.
~Kate Peebles
Speaking To The Mirror
I want to hold you up
so your long legs stretch
like kite strings twitch erratically,
but naturally,
with the wind patterns
I want it to be love
that I smell on your breath
not alcohol steamy and hot
and sliding like sweat
through your mind
Listen I’ve
been staring at you for an hour
painting hot clouds of steam
on the dull glass
There is nothing sexy about a
stunted chin and pill-shaped eyes
There is nothing sexy about a man
who lies to his reflection
But come on,
who wants to be stuck forever
beating out their song
tied to the flat hard pavement ?
~Joey Rubin
‘Work of Mourning'
Because a fishing-boat washed up–
empty– to a shore crowded
in fog and the bodies of the hopeful and still-
waiting–
I lift my axe today
to this pile of slash, for kindling.
The body makes its own
memories in muscle, in skin,
in all it contacts. The axe's flight catches
a skiff of gray sky in its down stroke,
and my back muscles burn through
the hard task of re-learning.
Because the boat was empty–
the hull washed over in foam–
and because the survival suits drifted ashore…
Red rubber collars gripped
around absent necks, and the long, flat limbs
collapsed over skeletons of air.
I think we must take comfort in our elements,
be heartened by the thunk thunk
of axe-work, as we sweat towards this vigil
of fire, though the dry land blinks
its thousand wet eyes, and the axe skids
over the surface of rain-softened wood.
~Elyse Fenton
MISSOULA
The rain drives the stretch of a thunderstorm
with me, sheeting the windshield and breaking
apart my sight as I come into Missoula.
Its coldness spreads up my neck and stops
at a daydream—the houses lift like haze.
The color of the land teals, smells of sagebrush.
Buffalo stand shoulder to shoulder from the Clark Fork
to the mountains, the earth unsteady when they move.
One by one glowing teepees appear
along the shadows of the cottonwoods.
Dim reflections of campfires
drift on the dusk-lit water.
The rain lessens. A dancer with electric orange
feathers swinging from his shield stops my car
in the middle of the street. He meets my eyes
as he raises an old war hammer and smacks my hood.
I remember my first powwow. A grandpa wearing
cowboy boots was speaking a slow dry Blackfeet
to the children on the stadium benches around him.
His face moved like water-beaten leather. He whooped,
swiping an invisible club. The children's eyes
widened—they laughed. He used his hands
like an old man at my grade school, who told us
how one day Coyote heard the prairie dogs
laughing at him and asked himself, "How can I
get back at my cousins?" He noticed a cloud
and said "I hope it rains to my belly" and it did.
But a few prairie dogs swam to a hill, so Coyote
wished the rain to flood over the mountains.
As my grandfather tells it, the first white
settlers found warriors draped in the trees—
as if, expecting a flood, the people had put their dead
where they wouldn't spoil. They saw black bears
covering bodies under the rotten trunks of cottonwoods.
Flocks of crows and eagles took their flesh into the sky.
The settlers buried the dead Indians and founded
a town: Hellgate. Their children renamed it Missoula.
On the interstate the rain picks up. Walls of rain
block out the land, muddy the streambeds,
and cut lines down the mountainsides. The rain's
ordering burgers in the drive-through, it catches
the blue-light special on bullets and dresses
for church where the wet air smells of fresh asphalt.
Arms flailing, fat children straight off the bus
and stumbling old men in fancy hats hit in mid air,
breaking apart as they pray, splattering on my hood.
The windshield wipers clear them into the road,
and I struggle for breath as they cover the car,
as the rain and I push through the night.
~Mackenzie Cole
Last Updated: April 5, 2007
