{"id":4985,"date":"2017-08-15T14:50:25","date_gmt":"2017-08-15T14:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=4985"},"modified":"2017-12-01T19:06:48","modified_gmt":"2017-12-01T19:06:48","slug":"three-p0ems-marisol-baca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=4985","title":{"rendered":"THREE P0EMS – Marisol Baca"},"content":{"rendered":"

SPIRAL<\/strong>
\n 
\nThree spirals bound<\/p>\n

to one another<\/p>\n

Three sisters<\/p>\n

At the edge of a stone<\/p>\n

what is the cosmos but a radial movement outward?<\/p>\n

to touch the fabric of one<\/p>\n

to see the astral projection of their other<\/p>\n

to forget for one moment<\/p>\n

that it is only a projection
\n 
\nSpiral is not spire<\/p>\n

Not arrows<\/p>\n

Not shields<\/p>\n

Not shells<\/p>\n

It is a movement<\/p>\n

the circles inside the corpus of a great tree<\/p>\n

A slice of granite<\/p>\n

A loop of river-bone<\/p>\n

Our family of memory<\/p>\n

The lost reflections of our arms and hands and our cheeks and our eyes<\/p>\n

the reflection at the edge of the mirror<\/p>\n

The sound of a voice as it travels up from a basement<\/p>\n

into the drawing room<\/p>\n

absent of folk\u2014absent of fire<\/p>\n

a cold dream the dark earth has of clouds and air
\n 
\nThe spire, the sword,<\/p>\n

embrace all ways<\/p>\n

to enter<\/p>\n

touch the life force<\/p>\n

touch that which only momentarily scrapes up<\/p>\n

against<\/p>\n

spiral that bleeds a shaft of light<\/p>\n

as dust in a ray of sun floats in a doorway
\n <\/p>\n

\n

 
\nTHE FLOODING<\/strong>
\n 
\nafter Gerald Stern<\/em><\/p>\n

On all these parched paths, in all this tattered landscape<\/p>\n

and arid wind and sapless woods<\/p>\n

I have never seen a drought<\/p>\n

which made the ground so cracked<\/p>\n

nor heard \u201cFlores Negras\u201d the way I did<\/p>\n

in 1980 in that cherry tree house<\/p>\n

on Sarah Lane, nor sang as I did<\/p>\n

then, my stars all flickering, my hair all singing<\/p>\n

my mother full of teeth, my father holding his<\/p>\n

voice out laughing, doing the dance<\/p>\n

of guitar and spirits, the sound of the strings, half cry<\/p>\n

half chuckle, the world at last a river of ice melt<\/p>\n

the three of us meandering and rippling,<\/p>\n

as eager as the flash flood as if we rushed towards unknown\u2014in 1980\u2014<\/p>\n

in New Mexico, strange thirsty New Mexico, desert<\/p>\n

of the Rio Grande, an hour away<\/p>\n

my aunt\u2019s house\u2014<\/p>\n

the overwhelming course of birth<\/p>\n

oh God of rivers, oh swiftly running God.
\n <\/p>\n

\n

 
\nVELELLA VELELLA<\/strong>
\n 
\nIt was the sight of death we saw first.<\/p>\n

The long silent beach and the warm carcasses of the jellies\u2014<\/p>\n

thousands of them\u2014camped\u2014waiting for the end.<\/p>\n

Little cellophane boats entangled in kelp.<\/p>\n

The sail-like appendages had the suggestion of sliced ginger.<\/p>\n

The clump-float was once buoyant on the water.<\/p>\n

Some became nests for sand fleas.<\/p>\n

Some lay in a pool of salt and brine.<\/p>\n

Their clear sails shivering against the day\u2019s breeze.<\/p>\n

Some piled,<\/p>\n

letting their color leak into the sand below,<\/p>\n

a crackle of blue fire and purple ooze.<\/p>\n

And some still sailing in the afternoon tide\u2014<\/p>\n

humming to themselves,<\/p>\n

drifting songs for zooids.<\/p>\n

How long did they wander?<\/p>\n

Their hollow tentacles were ghost hairs<\/p>\n

collecting the floating life beneath.<\/p>\n

Slowly they maundered into death, guided by the wind.<\/p>\n

My father filled his pockets with them<\/p>\n

and walked along the ocean throwing them back.
\n 
\n 
\n\"\"Marisol Baca is the author of Tremor<\/em>, a full length collection of poems forthcoming from Three Mile Harbor Press. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up around generations of family in an old adobe house with a horno in the back that her father built. Her family later settled in Fresno, California. She grew up within a family of educators, artists, and writers, and at an early age began writing poems and songs. Marisol received her bachelors in English from Fresno State University and won the Andres Montoya poetry scholarship prize. She received a fellowship from Cornell University, and in 2006, she received her Master of Fine Arts. While at Cornell, she won the Robert Chasen poetry award for her poem, Revelato. Currently, Marisol is an English professor at Fresno City College. She lives in Fresno with her husband in a house in the center of town. She continues to write and teach, and is busy working on her second book. Her poetry has been published in Riverlit, Shadowed: An Anthology of Women Writers, Asentos Review,<\/em> among others publications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SPIRAL   Three spirals bound to one another Three sisters At the edge of a stone what is the cosmos but a radial movement outward? to touch the fabric of one to see the astral projection of their other to forget for one moment that it is only a projection   Spiral is not spire [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5098,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[267],"class_list":["post-4985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-whirlpool-galaxy-by-nasa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4985"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5134,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4985\/revisions\/5134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}