THE BLACK HUMMINGBIRD

by Alejandro Escudé

Why all the gray skies [in Southern California]? It's a reasonable question with a fairly complex answer that we find ourselves asking yearly when they show up and stick around for a few months. Known as May Gray and June Gloom, the period’s a sign of transition from cool winter weather to scorching summer temperatures. —LAist, May 19, 2023. Photo: Ushering in June Gloom near Santa Ynez, California on June 01, 2020. | George Rose/Getty Images via KCET.

The grayness of May isn’t subtle.

It weighs on the birds too, erasing the landmarks.

I notice that my sight changes, eyes have a stalkier bond

To the naked mind—what is that about?

I exit my apartment, crossing the threshold of my door,

And the hallway is blue, chilly, despite the seventy degrees.

I need my poetry heroes to Lazarus from their graves

And deliver me back to my old selves, the dozens of poets

That came before this one who writes only gray verse.

But its always been the black hummingbird that flitted 

Through the glass of my window at the Catholic retreat 

I attended two years after my son was born.

I obeyed the order of silence. At twilight, I made my way

Past the Victorian lamp posts along the garden paths

To the dining hall. And we prayed before and after dinner.

When I returned home, the hummingbird followed.

I ask a coworker: does the gray sky affect your mood?

It is kind of dark, he says, missing the mark.

The grayness lasts so that even the darkness of night is gray.

I shift in my rocky bed, the hours graying into more hours.

You can live this way, you know, many years,

Reading between the testament folds of the colorless clouds,

Seeking something beyond the stormy horizon 

You have come to expect—that gray, prodigious god.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

SOME WORDS FOR MEANWHILE

by Lucia Galloway

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.