Former Santa Clara County Poet Laureate Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, teacher, and editor-in-chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. Publishing in three genres, she is the author of five books of poems including the just-released Listening to Mars (Cornerstone Press, 2024) and The Behaviour of Clocks (WordFarm, 2019). She taught writing at San José State University for ten years and continues to teach workshops locally and online. Her prose poem “4.6 Billion Years” will go to the Moon as part of the Lunar Codex project via the Griffin/VIPER mission in 2024. www.sallyashton.com

Sky Writing

What remains to be written of this year will need a cloudless sky and the acrobatic courage of a stunt pilot twisting through runes to wrestle language from smoke. It will need a still afternoon, one from September, with that kind of blue that snaps to attention. Make it something a child can read, good news instead of threats—surrender Dorothy—that darkened other skies. No tornado, no wind. Use words that make amends.

from Listening to Mars, Cornerstone Press 2024

* * *

Cami DuMay (née Rothmuller) is a writer from Davis, California. She is in her final quarter of undergraduate studies at UC Davis, and will begin her MFA studies at the Michener Center for Writers this fall. Cami’s work has appeared in Hare’s Paw, Burningword, Red Rock Review, and others. Her first chapbook, This Canyon Has a Thousand Names, came out earlier this year. While Cami writes about myriad aspects of life, from intimacy and trauma to nature and insects, her work most often returns to an intersection of nature, madness, and secular worship.

Idolatry

 

I don’t know who built it or when, but the beams,

raw with aging and near-stripped of pigment,

suggest a timeless worship.

 

We still take our shoes off and set them

reverently on the stones, perhaps wondering if this place

could tell more to our bare skin

 

than our godless eyes, and we step inward

looking for warmth, tracing our toes

along the scars that line the floorboards

 

where pews once were, in a time

that our bruising knees long for. The windowless frames

suggest an inside and an outside,

 

but the ceiling is open like a chest

letting all the sunlight in, and the forest

is asking endlessly, sending trails of ivy

 

and ushering the moss and lichen to decorate the thresholds,

to find the faint rancid oil of human touch

in the woodgrain, to amend it,

 

taking God back from the pages

that molder behind the pulpit. Thrown stones

lie in their guilt on the floorboards, summoning

 

memories of flight and purpose, the gifts

of worthy hands. And the wreckage

of the windows they found lies

 

in entropic mosaics, chiming scree unsettling itself,

assembling its stains to form a picture of redemption,

quivering in the sunlight,

 

babbling of its thousand rifts. A wonder

that something broken so long can gleam so lovely

and cut so finely the soles of our naked feet.

 

 

Poem published in Red Rock Review Issue 51: Idolatry - Red Rock Review

January 14, 2021 Frank Stanford: A Talk by John Amen, Greg Brownderville, & John Erwin

2020

November 31, 2020 MALDEF Reading