ABDUCTED GOLDFISH

by Kenton K. Yee

Dean Young, 1955-2022

In The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf, 2010), the poet Dean Young's exhilarating book-length essay on writing poetry, he repeatedly questions and rejects the idea that the most important thing in writing poetry is an acquired mastery of craft, suggesting that it comes at the expense of intuition, risk-taking, wildness, and negative capability. He writes, exasperatedly and in all caps, "WE ARE MAKING BIRDS, NOT BIRDCAGES!" —Michael Dumanis, Editor of Bennington Review

I ping. I ping love.

 

I ping love and I love pings.

Here’s one from the library:

Due in two.

 

Love me my deadlines.

Ping me butter melting,

cantaloupe ripening,

gasps quickening.

 

Dean Young.

 

Ducks.

 

Abduct.

 

I’m waiting for the gulls to return my goldfish.

I’m waiting for squirrels to sing like nightingales,

daisies to bear me raspberries,

and bonsai trunks or cornflakes.

I’m waiting for bugles to herald the dying of salmon.

 

All this sun and all that sun.

The melting hours. Starlight. Dew.

The lackadaisical one

who settles for steam turned to rice.

Author’s Note: This poem is in memory of Dean Young, who passed away a few days ago. When I first took up poetry, I didn't know what to make of Dean Young and his rich language and ranging movements. Now, he's become one of my poetry role models.

Kenton K. Yee recently placed poetry in Constellations, Plume Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Indianapolis Review, Matter, Lily Poetry Review, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. An Iowa Summer Poetry Workshop alumnus, he writes from northern California.

Haiku

Photo: A seagull rests as workers clean the contaminated beach Wednesday after an oil spill in Newport Beach, Calif. Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press, October 10, 2021.

Deborah P Kolodji is the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and has published over 1100 haiku worldwide.  Her first full-length book highway of sleeping towns won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from the Haiku Foundation.

SHUTDOWN

by Sara Berkeley

Image source: nationalparks.org

The day the government shut down
the ocean showed up for work.
They put some barricades up
but waves kept coming in, unfazed.
The toilets were locked
and the barricades went up
to stop the people coming in to the park
but we went early, before they closed
the National Seashore, and I can attest
that the seals and the pelicans
and the small fish and the birds that eat them
kept coming back for more.

The waves were giving it their all,
rending the heart of the beach in two,
throwing their violent weight around
while Congress ran aground;
the rush of foam and fuming toil
of the wind blowing spume back
from the crests as loud as the silence
along the corridors of power,
the sand hot beneath our feet,
the water silvery gold, the gulls
laughing and crying as we were
laughing and crying too.

Pelicans flew as low as they dared
we reckoned they hadn't heard
that the government was hung -
hoist by its own petard -
that they'd put some wooden barriers up
to stop the tourist cars
from visiting the National Seashore
while well beneath the roar of the breakers
tearing up the shale
and the keening wail of the gulls
the day was a good day, ungoverned,
lovely, full of miracles.


Sara Berkeley was born and raised in Ireland. She has had five collections of poetry published, one of short stories, and a novel. She has been widely anthologized, including in the Harvard University Press An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter, dog, cat, guinea pig, and varying numbers of fish. When she is not writing poetry, she is a nurse for traumatic brain injured patients. She is well ready for the shutdown to end.