Elizabeth Erbeznik
Introduced by Guest Editor George Yatchisin
Tender and tough, brittle and bruising, the poems of Elizabeth Erbeznik snag on the hope and horror of home like a fishing line caught on tin cans afloat in Sacramento’s American River. While Erbeznik writes “belonging is denied/with official language,” her clear-eyed witness makes beauty bloom with unsentimental poetics. She can even pull off a sestina that wisely demystifies the California dream while still making us ache for that failure.
Tule Fog
I can’t loosen my grip and thoughts
wander, are lost
in a rental car blur
of hot air and wipers. Sacramento
is home but I had to leave
before I could want
to come back. Red lights peak
through fog but high beams
don’t work, only shatter
against all this white.
The cheapest flights depart at dawn,
so early, it’s still night.
The way forward is hard
to see. I don’t remember
when my dad stopped speaking.
This fog is familiar, these streets are not.
Citrus Heights, Orangevale, Fair Oaks: named
for the ghosts of trees, paved over
and planted with strip malls. It’s true I’m a person
who once missed flights. Fog is not
the culprit. Wrung out, brittle, distracted
by grief. Sometimes only hungover.
Older now, I set alarms
and get to the airport early. I used to leave
home, wet hair in winter,
and drive to school past fields full of mist
and cows where today
there are only houses. I think
my dad still knows me.
First a wish, leaving home
soon became a habit. I was afraid
this winter mud would stick, would hold, would never
let me go. Near the airport, houses
are tightly packed, built on land that floods.
It’s hard to live with all this risk.
When he fell into a window, my dad
didn’t call out, didn’t ask for help. No words
were found for this rush of blood, this spray
of broken glass. Some fruits grow best
when drenched in fog, but fog
is disappearing. I leave behind
what I will always mourn.
The fog. The fruit.
The vanishing of both.
Nuisance Species
Beavers were always here, but California was built with guns
and spades and rivers were blasted
from gravel beds.
We filled weekend bags with precious
rubble. Families shatter too.
Before the gold-dust settled, beavers
were mostly gone and people forgot
they were native. Two sisters
shuffled between houses, girl-
appendages, removable parts, too young
to disappear into the cracks
of separation. Beavers
predate guns and gold,
were discovered in cave paintings, in carvings
on rock. Belonging is denied
with official language:
Extirpation, Depredation, Custody, Divorce.
Qualified with prefixes:
step- half- ex-
In the every other weekend house, our bedroom
was furnished for guests, an all-
white sofa draped with a sheet when we burst
through the door on Fridays. We knew
beavers as cartoons, creatures who talked
through the impediment
of too large teeth, and thought they belonged
only in our imaginations.
Girls live in the imagination as well. The problem
is being real.
From the weekend house, we walked down-
hill to the river, to a bridge too old
for cars. Our bodies, too big for houses,
felt small above gaps in the wooden
planks. Feet tingled, not knowing
we wouldn’t fall.
The river was fast and deep, tamed by bike paths,
boat ramps, bridges, and dams,
but also wild, home
to salmon and steelhead, herons and ducks.
Home also to beavers, unwelcome pests
in a landscape altered by
driveways, by the harsh
monoculture of grass. The sleek
head surprised us, barely
visible near the bluffs. On the side
too steep for people.
We watched it swim, its movements
marked by disappearing
lines of water.
Still afraid, left clinging
to the bridge, we stared down
on what people forgot but the land-
scape remembered, on historical
wreckage,
on what survives.
Fall-Run of the Chinook Salmon
From our house, it was a downhill walk to the American River.
The shore was lined with bones, the tattered remains of salmon,
picked over by birds and crawling with flies. A festival of rot.
All mud and buzz and stink of dead fish. We wanted to go home.
But dogs pulled at leashes, straining to run loose, and only dad
could hold them. Few rivers are wild, flow freely in California.
First fur, then gold, drew hungry men west to California.
My sister and I still fought those walks to the river.
The weeds had thorns and the bridge scared us both but our dad
said no when we asked to be carried. We knew nothing of salmon,
what each pile of bird-cleaned bones had endured to come home.
They laid their eggs in gravel, then waited for weeks to rot.
We wanted to watch TV, to let our brains succumb to rot
with shows about the complicated lives of people from California,
but couldn’t name the fish, the trees, the hungry birds at home.
Before gold and dams, water ran silver as Chinook swam upriver
to spawn. They say streams were crossed on the backs of salmon.
Our river spit out handfuls of dead fish, leapt over to follow dad.
Mom’s house backed a busy road, not water. On weekends, dad
needed to be outside, with mud and wet leaves. Life-giving rot.
Plants decay and families fester, like the putrid salmon
that fertilized the shore. A keystone species in California.
When one family fell apart, a new one took root by the river.
Chopped with dams, the American is a broken home.
Salmon spawn in native streams. They find their way home,
in a state that consumes too much water. No tree-hugger, our dad
loved wildness but voted for builders of dams. Our snow-fed river
once flooded houses and turned crops into acres of rot.
Where cities end, big farms begin and water shapes California.
So rivers are diverted. Too fragmented, too hot, for salmon.
At the fish hatchery, we witnessed man-made salmon.
Some smolts reach the ocean, fewer ever return home.
They get lost navigating the messed up rivers of California.
He wanted more salmon, trees that fed from their bones, but dad
still sided with farmers. No one has time for systems of rot
and regeneration. People, not fish, control the fate of rivers.
My California is veined with the bodies and bones of salmon.
I always return to the river. It holds my memories of home.
Look, said dad, consider both sides: bright scales and rot.
Elizabeth Erbeznik is an educator with a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions, Catamaran Literary, Flyway, Los Angeles Review, Split Lip Magazine, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Originally from Northern California, she lives with her family in Austin, TX.
George Yatchisin was appointed Santa Barbara Poet Laureate in April 2025 and is the author of The First Night We Thought the World Would End.
Thank you for reading Volume 3, Number 5
