ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Heidi Seaborn is Editorial Director of The Adroit Journal and author of the debut collection Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019) and the chapbook Finding My Way Home (FLP, 2018). Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review and Tar River. She’s currently an NYU MFA candidate.
Poets Resist
Edited by Matty Layne Glasgow
November 5, 2019
Edited by Matty Layne Glasgow
November 5, 2019
Letter to My Children Regarding Their Childhood Home as the Getty Fire Rages
The world ends in fire
— Robert Frost
Remember our home — palm trees lined the walk
to where it rested on a grassy lawn. Single story, white
with black shutters. A ranch, they called it. Circled in green —
the nodding agapanthus, magnolia, lemon and fig trees,
hyacinth bushes and morning glory threading the trellis
behind the pool. Up above the sea of Los Angeles,
notched into the haunches of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Coyotes would venture down at dusk, hungry, roaming
for the wandering cat, like ours. We’d hike up there —
at the top of our road, where the lushness fell away
and the chaparral trail started. We could see the desert
that LA was once, and we could see forever —
the vast city filling the basin like broken dishes in a sink.
We could see how the city bumped along the Pacific Ocean.
Our home close enough that seagulls would scavenge
the garbage on pick up days. And in the fall,
when the Santa Ana winds blew, remember breathing
the sea air mingled with jasmine?
We’d complain that the Santa Ana’s made us all a little crazy.
But that was before the fires came licking down
the Santa Monica Mountains, ignited by the hot breath
of the Santa Anas, swallowing the coyote’s howl
into the canyons and then pummeling down our road,
like water would in a heavy rain. Eucalyptus crackling.
Palms exploding. Then the houses blowing up one after the other
as if bombed, leaving blackened carcasses, dead remains
of a time when we created an oasis in a desert
and thought it was home.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
