Susan Gubernat

Atmospheric River

 

Winter rainstorms flounce a pink camellia bush
like the bottom hem of a woman’s gown—

a certain kind of woman at galas, on runways,
wearing vintage someone else has fumigated

and freshened, while the leathery woman
on her haunches near the curb bends so low

her forehead nearly touches the swollen earth.
It looks like reverent prayer. It isn’t prayer.

Her cardboard sign soaks and crumbles.
Where last night she had laid her head down

now the letters run, an atmospheric river.
They say it rains on the just and unjust alike:

Refuse that lie. The woman’s eyes follow
them on the street: the scarved and booted

under an umbrella’s canopy. Even when
the winds batter them, upend them, tear

them inside out, they have a place to go.
We have shelter.       We have homes.

 

On Turning 75

There will be cake. And something hard,
in silver, which will outlast me. For now
I’ll let it encircle my wrist tightly, knowing
soon enough it will slip off, clatter.
And I won’t be there to relish the wrist bone
once the tiresome flesh has melted—
all thin, for once, as a magazine cover.
Here, I’ll take a second piece, topped
with thick buttercream roses
to smear along my mouth.
You say I’m always getting lipstick
on my front tooth like a crazy
old lady and for once I’ll mean it,
not suck it off, maybe go braless
beneath the dress a young girl
stopped to compliment yesterday.
I had turned back for the thing
on the grocery list I’d forgotten then;
I’ve forgotten it now.

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Susan Gubernat is the author of The Zoo at Night which won the Raz-Shumaker poetry book prize (University of Nebraska Press), Analog House (Finishing Line Press), and Flesh, which won the Marianne Moore Prize (Helicon Nine Editions). Her poems have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle as well as Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, The Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, among other journals. Her work has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, among others; she has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Professor Emerita of English at California State University, East Bay, she has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Millay Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and artist fellowships from the states of New Jersey and New York. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she now lives in San Francisco.