Double Dutch I used to watch the girls jump double dutch their arms the swinging ropes wrapped round each other thwap thwapping a cocoon of muscle memory musical laughter an arc of childhood. I used to watch them, wondrous flames of fiery girls feeling my heavy feet my round face offering nothing in return.     Jess Sand was born on the East Coast, and has lived in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, calling Oakland home for the last decade. She has always written poetry, appearing in print for the first time as a child, eventually earning a degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University,…

Superbloom My therapist says I carry unresolved grief. She says I need to focus more on what I can change. Awake at five in the morning again, I can’t stop thinking about how long we lived through drought, how last summer California’s temperatures were higher than they had ever been. And then the winter rains came, bringing with them fields of poppies. Outside my open window the sky turns into a scarf of spring brilliance, a show of striking beauty. I want to hold onto hope but I can’t tune out the howl of a single coyote, blue as a piano. A Little Love Letter to Southern California in Summer …

Early Morning Considerations after a Night of Rain There you are, first light freckles in the curtainswith dawn while the jay insists: It’s six. Six!It’s six — as if I don’t know that. Good morning, welcome, new Thursday. I arcthe blankets away. The dog sheds gladness allaround me as war news shrapnels out of NPR. Outside, everything is still gleam & green afterthe first rain in months, & petrichor — a word somepoets sequin into their pastorals — left in the wind. Petrichor! I imagine a starched table & gold candlesas erect-pinkied connoisseurs sniff a Zin & a guesthighbrows: I adore a good pertichor. It’s not in my vocabulary of…

The ways my life changed after the witch turned me into a bird First off, I can’t do math.Just can’t. I see one seed shellor more than one seed. I’m not sureif this is a bird thing or a me thing.I can’t smell, which is fine in this cage.But my memory is great, maybe even better. I miss: the scent of a thyme, garlic, butteron a seared steak (I avoid thinking of chicken,it’s conflicting). Sex and cupping breastswith warm hands. The happy buzzfrom half a cocktail before too many. What they don’t tell you (because they can’t)is that shitting is bliss.It makes up for all the above.I eat even when…

You Don’t Start Out wanting to write about pain, the pain lives near you, neighborly and you begin to rely on it as if it would almost always agree to feed your cats or take in the recycling can. Its curtains blow in a midnight breeze the way yours do. There exists a kind of empathy. And you’re lonely. You’re willing to turn toward anything to make a friend.    Jack’s Death At the end of the day what else is there to do but write a poem: the blue and white pillow case you wrapped his body in. The suddenness with which your friend stopped shoveling dirt over the…

  Summer Solstice Morning heats up like a topaz jewel. By noon the matchstick grasses look like beatengold if you squint against the June sheen. Once you touched the burning plexus, the naked fiery hive of tormented passion alive inside the body of another summer, and lived.    Instructions from My Double Snag the day’s plush,_____its seedy glitter, __________those morsels packed _____with juice. Sponge in flecks of goldfish _____shimmer. Filch __________cobwebs of dusk; _______________rummage __________the rain. Jasmine, tuberose, _____gardenias, snakes, asphalt, soot—_____poke your nose __________into their perfume. _____Buildings puffing fat smokestack cigs; _____tangerine fingernails, __________mango computer screens, _______________dreams. Scraps, rags, __________electric tubing, _____all mixed together with wire and pencils,_____with mayonnaise…

The Bastard Children of the Moon My mother loved the Man in the Moon.Nights, his bony light shined down to herFrom where he’d hungHalf-naked in the elms.She would read to us quickly,Snapping shutThe tall book she held half opened in her lap,His name on her lips.The words that rhymed are lost. My mother loved the Man in the Moon.Once we were put to bed,Their talking through the walls changed to laughter,Laughter changed to cries.I went to spy.I saw him waxing over her body.I saw her sink beyond the dark side of his thighs. My mother loved the Man in the Moon.He hit her hard.She fell to the earth.The kitchen floor…

Cloud Report, 8/1/22 Even more light is the opposite of dawn. Or maybe it’s wind stirring maples and oaks before a thunderstorm overtakes them, the sky a plate of solid pewter. Maybe the opposite is my dog lying beside my chair an hour after the storm barreled through. Now whipped piles of clouds float like placid pale fish, covering up miles of clear blue.   Cloud Report, 1/20/23 Same as yesterday and the day before: heavy gray overlaps mounds of cream, no patches of blue, a few sparse snowflakes fall. The dog is sleeping downstairs. Each morning delivers me here, where a crow lands in a bare oak at the…

Suspended to a homeless man in Burlington, Vermont Floating vertically above the frozen groundhis worn-out sleeping bag forms an eggshellso fragile, everybody walks around afraid to touch, to break, keeping hands wellgloved inside pockets, keeping fingers warm,blocking the thought of how much like a cell   he looks: Suspended, embryonic form,apparent only when the sun is low,gold light side-shining through its pulsing storm.   Averted eyes will never see belowthe smooth blank surface of that ivory case.Like Homer, stuck forever in limbo,   he sleeps in his socially prescribed placeunless, lungs filled with icy yolk, he drowns.     Cindy Ellen Hill is a writer, musician and gardener in Middlebury,…

“leviathan” an L.A. story my body hangs suspended under a skyscapeof smog-masked stars — dividedby the water of your infinity pooli float, blind to the edgenever knowing how close i am to fallingover. alexa plays that indieartist you discovered on bandcampwhile high on blueberry morning.you’d rather listen to him than me —he makes you culturedinteresting. the midnight breeze forces your scentinto me, flooding my airways with thesun-soaked citrus of a california boywith your tangled bun and nine o’clock shadow —you wear shades at night because they’re“prescription” — and everyone loves it.your attention is the currency you use torun your freckled nose along bare stomachsuntil it’s buried between thighs. we crave…