GAS Featured Poet: Karen Pierce Gonzalez

 

    Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s poetry credits include True North (Origami Poems Project microchap), and the forthcoming chapbooks: Coyote In the Basket of My Ribs (Alabaster Leaves), Down River with Li Po  (Black Cat Poetry Review). Her fiction, non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, and two of her plays have been staged.

    She is also an assemblage artist who follows the grain of tree bark, the threads in textiles, and endless streams of color. Her art has shown in several galleries and has also appeared in several literary journals.

The heartbreaking geometry of an origami heart   

                                                             

is there in the tri-fold red and white rice paper I stuff into the cracks of my four chambers to stop them from splitting apart. Asymmetrical sheets once square, now creased, slip into the seams, slide down beating walls; stick to the flesh of prayers.

 

Layered, diagonal and vertical lines swell; rectangular corners round out just enough for me to stand odd-angled, chest high in new dreams: grey grassland cranes, blue-tail butterflies, and wet, jumping frogs rise up from the crevices.

 

*after Restoration, Jenifer Yuriko Nogaki

 

 

 

 In a Bird Cage   (Haibun)

 

Strong coffee with cream, Ruby’s favorite. She slowly pours boiling liquid into her favorite cup, thick and hand-painted like her. Then stirs in condensed milk, easy to store in very small spaces. With broad strokes, she spoon-mixes the two until hot and cold meld. Hands rubbing the mug’s decorative buds, she whistles to her canary wake up. When it warbles back, Ruby sits on their shared plaid perch and sips as it sings.

 

winter blooms stay closed

morning sunlight too late

petals won’t blossom

 

Isotropic stardust: me 

Behind a star in Hercules’s shoulder,

I hide from astronomer probes

searching to dissect, colonize

 

leaked radio waves, barely heard,

whisper there are cracks

in this constellation’s armor

 

I tightly hold his upper arm.

 

If I let go, I could drift into a black hole valley

or sink to the bottom of a frozen planetary sea

partially thawed by the heat of my despair -

 

I would be lost. 

 

Beneath me, Earth— a pinball

in a game I no longer play—

pings against others in the Milky Way

 

my first home, once-believed-to-be my only home,

moves too closely to others, has boundary issues,

does not yield enough

 

As above, so below

the sages of that world explain

the constant push-pull;  at first too small to be seen

 

my body rippled

from collisions billions of years away,     

I space-swam to this kneeling giant—

 

nicked by asteroids, poked by scientific claims—

and now kiss his shifting seams -

love them, for their own fractured sake.

 

on track

sun and moon lights, wired together over a railroad junction, signal to flagmen

 

stop  go    stop  go    stop  go

 

in the train’s coach, we whir by a town: flat walls, blank windows, street lamps unlit  

 

stop  go    stop  go    stop  go

 

the conductor eyes the horizon rising above parched sidewalks, unpeopled streets and stokes steam-powered engine; smoke 

billows up –

stop  go    stop  go    stop  go

 

the end of that line is a tree branch climbing into the sky,

mouths open, we see our reflections

 

in the rail car’s leaf-streaked glass 

 

 

Among Phantoms

                             After Ghost Forest, Jack Bedell

I

 

If I do this

            lay down in the boat

 

so as not to fall out

             I will miss the silhouette

 

of nothing here

            a thinning horizon

 

a cypress graveyard 

            haunted grove of leafless limbs

           

stripped by oil-greed

a wasteland

 

crows no longer murder

            beavers no longer dam.

 

II

 

What trunked certainty I had

            about regrowth wavers

 

without windbreak

            lichen cannot cling 

 

fog skirts roll up

            sawgrass shores, naked.

 

III

 

Nature’s margins

are now muted

           

evolutionary prattle 

            rains from low-lying clouds

           

onto this skiff                                   

            spine absorbs water

 

hull heavy, I sink to the bottom

            of what little I know.

 

Silt cradles me —

            innocence rises to the surface

 

ebbs towards ghost forest

            fingers trace bark braille

 

silent

stories remember being told.                        

                                   

 

Still in the Sea