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| Poster by Jennifer Maravillas for the Women's March on Washington |
There is only this way,
this one way,
to breathe while
rain falls—
finally falls & falls—
in Southern California.
Comes in repeated fits,
storms over parched lands
& lawns. Pools at our doorsteps
from overflowing gutters, sheets
off the pavements of parking lots,
carves new rivulets
in our gardens, our
paths and trails.
One way while
crews erect viewing stands
in DC-mile after mile
of bleachers, media towers-
along the storied route.
While in airports, passengers
clutch boarding passes, eye
podium monitors.
While on basement floors
& kitchen tables, women paint
slogans: Resistance is Joy.
Pack boots, mufflers
& down jackets.
D.C., Chicago, Tucson, Denver, L.A.
. . . (will the buses make it?) while
the women hope that nothing happens,
knowing that nothing
can mean anything now.
Lucia Galloway’s chapbook The Garlic Peelers won the Quill’s Edge Press 2014 inaugural chapbook competition. She is also author of Venus and Other Losses (2010) and a chapbook, Playing Outside (2005), and has published work in Tar River Poetry, Comstock Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, among other publications. Her poems have received awards from the Bread Loaf School of English, Artists Embassy International, Rhyme Zone, and the MacGuffin National Poet Hunt. She lives in Southern California, where she curates a reading series in her home town of Claremont.
