Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. She is the author of eight poetry collections, including Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Award, and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of a Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies and the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press. Her poetry has been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, Al Young, Rafael Jesús González, and Maxine Hong Kingston for its beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. She is also the author of 14 novels including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion. Mary taught Creative Writing at CSUS for over three decades until her retirement in 2008. In the early 1970’s she founded the CSUS Creative Writing Program with poet Dennis Schmitz and novelist Richard Bankowsky.  Mary’s newest book, Creativity: Where Poems Begin, looks at the origins of inspiration, told in a way that encourages other writers to find their own unique paths to the place where inspiration comes from.

Fever

                                                            it lifts me from my bed
                                                            in an ascending spiral
                                                            whispering my name
                                                            over and over
                                                            like a disappointed lover . . .

                                                                                       Mary Mackey, “105 Degrees and Rising”
                                                                                       from The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams

I nearly died from a high fever just before my third birthday. I remember the experience well, because it was the first time I saw how thin and bright the world could be. I remember lying on a green couch in an over-heated room. It must have been winter, because frost coated the windowpanes, and snow lay on the bare branches of the trees in big lumps. My mother had given me a bottle of Coca-Cola on the principle that I needed to take in more fluids. My temperature must have been somewhere between 106 ͦ  and 107 ͦ  Fahrenheit, because I was already experiencing that wonderful, detached floating feeling I always get far above 105 ͦ.
As I lay on that green couch, a warm golden light—the kind you only see for a few moments at sunset—flooded the living room. My parents moved toward me so slowly that I could see their clothing billow out and collapse in an invisible wind. Bending over me, they lost their faces and floated toward the ceiling like huge birds. The Coke bottle on the coffee table multiplied into dozens of Coke bottles, which flew up and circled in a huge glassy aura over their heads.
Light weaved around the molding and splayed across the ceiling like spilled glue. Behind my parents’ heads, the golden light turned into a veil composed of long, multi-colored ribbons that danced in an invisible wind. The veil expanded, consuming the green couch, the blankets, the windows, and my parents. Suddenly it parted, and I saw trees with red and gold leaves (impossible because it was the dead of winter), and little children holding out their hands and calling to me to come play with them.
I couldn’t have had much of a vocabulary at that age. Nevertheless, words streamed into my mind and came out of my mouth, combining and re-combining into entirely new things. I believe this was the moment when I was given the gift of poetry.

***

Now enjoying the title of Professor Emeritus, Joshua McKinney teaches half-time at CSUS, where he taught full-time for a quarter century. He resides in the fire-ravaged region known as California, where he spends his time wrangling a pet guinea pig and trying, feebly, to play the five-string banjo. An amateur lichenologist, he is a long-standing member of the California Lichen Society. For the past thirteen years he has served as co-editor, with Tim Kahl, of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.

Proselytus

                            The heron has no need of heaven,
not when ankling above its own blurred image bent
              back by light upon the river’s skin,
              nor when the prayer of its patient waiting
                            hones hunger to an angel and
the river’s liquid shiver ceases, nor when,
              without anger, its chaste brain drives at once, beyond
                            the abducting eye, its yellow bill-spear
              down, through its mirrored surface self into
                                          that other world of blood and flesh.

                            Fish and frogs attend it, and ducklings
dabble within the shadow of its slaty cloak,
              open to enfold their new-hatched and
              immaculate death. The heron troubles the water
                            where I have come at dawn, entering late
to answer, with the others, its voiceless
              summons stalking the fog. I walk the river’s
                            willowed, reedy rim, where rime has left
the smooth rocks slick. There, as I slip
                                          and pick my blunted way with care, I hear

                            the heron lift its vast-winged weight aloft
and know that I have strayed too near, and see
              shrouded in a downed cloud’s breath,
              its apparition rise, take flight, unhurried
                            and sure, beyond the farther shore where
I cannot follow. There, it will descend, tall-
              shouldered, crowned, to minster
                            to the mice and voles that mine the mead.
And I am left with my need, unable to read
                            the runed sand where a god stood.

 

from The Missouri Review