Mountain Garter Snake There you were again, slipping away so imperceptiblyI wouldn’t have seen you had I not been on the alert.   After four sightings in a week of your sleek darknessand lightning stripes, the silent parting of grasses   as you whipped away under arches heavy with seed heads,I’d come to think of you as a tacit friend. Today, though,   when I stopped short to admire your swift passage, you toostopped, then raised your severe head on your slender   neck, which is also your body, above the litter of winter’ssycamore leaves and spring’s tangle of vetch, and I heard   myself gasp. For a minute or…

Notes for My Mother’s Caregiver Remember to take off her glasses when she’s sleeping   Her wounds need to be cleaned daily   Rotate her body every four hours   She likes milk in her tea   She shouldn’t eat alone   Cut her food for her   At risk for aspiration   Put on her glasses in the morning   He fixed the fox on me means she doesn’t trust you   Go to her, touch her, talk to her face   Comfort is up to us   Dying should be quiet   She thinks you’re an imposter   She thinks you stole her purse   This is her…

Nocturne The kind where the horses have been hitched to the trees.Where the granary door’s been locked and the moneystashed in the box in the wall. If it’s free,my grandfather used to say, I will takeeven a punch to the face. I think that’s a misquote,but that’s what I do these days. I mess with the syntax—livein the belongings—of the dead. My mother goesto bed, and I’m left to turn the locks in the house, to sitin the kitchen and survey what’s left on the table.I know there is no way to safeguard what we have.No bolt that will hold. My grandfather couldn’thave seen himself growing old. His fortune at…

Traffic Three girls in the car behind me are singingand dancing inside their seatbeltsrocking the car and clapping their handsto the same tempo of a different songthat was already playing in my headIt’s the very brink of summerand my heart is dancing under a seatbeltof its own. I’m trying to believethis sudden permissionto feel someone else’s joywill be enough to make me forgetwhere I’m going and fall in lovewith this car crash of being aliveI cannot hear the singing girlsor the song that lifts them off the pageof a day so average it could be yesterdayeven the stoplight is dancing and turninggreen against an endless cobalt skyas we drive away…

Woven With each conversation and passing day,the selvedge unravels, taking the selfin singular and pluralized form.You’ve watched the loom,how it reminded you of a silent harpwaiting for a seraph’s strum,in anticipation, the genesis of intricaciesvillage scenes, hunts, foliage,apocalypses, droughts, miraculousdraughts of fish, mythical creaturesand life on nebulas, sprawlingsometimes succinct narratives,made by blunt needles, ready eyes openfollowed by the distance of a strand,and turning skeinthe warp and weft of parallels,silken convergences,umber, golden, persimmon and onyx,threads in shades of skin.     Gina Ferrara lives and writes in New Orleans. Her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Dovecote, and The Poetry Ireland Review among others. Her latest collection, Amiss, is forthcoming…

On Goleta Pier High tide, no room to walkalong the beach. I head outover the splintered planks,empty but for a hundred pigeons,a handful of young men fishing,killing time, having nothingbetter to do. . . .              at the end,the pier angles toward the heartof Santa Cruz, an island floatingon channel mist . . . beyond whichthe Chumash believed the deadpassed into paradise througha western gate. . . .                      I stop a minute,thinking of my wife in Heliopolis,visiting where her grandparentsand her mother, as a child,lived in another world . . .and where the Temple of…

Buddies There’s the one your wife can’t stand,and there’s the one whose wifecan’t stand you, and there’sthe one whose wife can’t standyour wife, and the one whose wifeyour wife can’t stand, and the onewhose wife you can’t stand, no,be honest—you hate that bitch.Can you see the pattern here?Is it coincidence that feond (fiend)and freond (friend), both masculineagent nouns, were often pairedalliteratively in Old English? Is itfor this that the drinking hornsof Heorot must stand mead-less andthe grease-slicked flesh of feastersin the firelight unilluminated go?How many best men bested, howmany best-laid plans shoved downthe gangway aft of a sinkingfriendship because yougot it wrong, because your tongueslipped or you glanced, too intentlyor…

Poem in Which I Married Young and Stayed in My Hometown I never became a poet because, well, who has time?It was a kiddish, indulgent dream—I know that now.Each morning I read The Academy of American Poets’poem-a-day in my inbox, and honestly, I only understandabout a third of them. I hate pretense and obscuremythology almost as much as I hated being married.I was a restless bride and soon started catting around.My husband divorced me when other wives called methe town slut. But in their whispers I heard a tingeof envy. I let my husband have the kids. I know—what kind of mother does that? A motherwho thought she wanted to…