Author: Christina's Words

“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford

“Cruising with the Beach Boys” by Dana Gioia

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So strange to hear that song again tonight
Travelling on business in a rented car
Miles from anywhere I’ve been before.
And now a tune I haven’t heard for years
Probably not since it last left the charts
Back in L.A. in 1969.
I can’t believe I know the words by heart
And can’t think of a girl to blame them on.

Every lovesick summer has its song,
And this one I pretended to despise,
But if I was alone when it came on,
I turned it up full-blast to sing along —
A primal scream in croaky baritone,
The notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred.
No wonder I spent so much time alone
Making the rounds in Dad’s old Thunderbird.

Some nights I drove down to the beach to park
And walk along the railings of the pier.
The water down below was cold and dark,
The waves monotonous against the shore.
The darkness and the mist, the midnight sea,
The flickering lights reflected from the city —
A perfect setting for a boy like me,
The Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity.

I thought by now I’d left those nights behind,
Lost like the girls that I could never get,
Gone with the years, junked with the old T-Bird.
But one old song, a stretch of empty road,
Can open up a door and let them fall
Tumbling like boxes from a dusty shelf,
Tightening my throat for no reason at all
Bringing on tears shed only for myself.

“Cruising with the Beach Boys” by Dana Gioia, from Daily Horoscope. © Graywolf Press, 2002.

“On Punctuation” by Elizabeth Austen

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not for me the dogma of the period
preaching order and a sure conclusion
and no not for me the prissy
formality or tight-lipped fence
of the colon and as for the semi-
colon call it what it is
a period slumming
with the commas
a poser at the bar
feigning liberation with one hand
tightening the leash with the other
oh give me the headlong run-on
fragment dangling its feet
over the edge give me the sly
comma with its come-hither
wave teasing all the characters
on either side give me ellipses
not just a gang of periods
a trail of possibilities
or give me the sweet interrupting dash
the running leaping joining dash all the voices
gleeing out over one another
oh if I must
punctuate
give me the YIPPEE
of the exclamation point
give me give me the curling
cupping curve mounting the period
with voluptuous uncertainty

“On Punctuation” by Elizabeth Austen, from The Girl Who Goes Alone. © Floating Bridge Press, 2010.

“Common Ground” by Paul J. Willis

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Today I dug an orange tree out of the damp, black earth.
My grandfather bought a grove near Anaheim
at just my age. Like me, he didn’t know much.
“How’d you learn to grow oranges, Bill?”
friends said. “Well,” he said, “I look at what

my neighbor does, and I just do the opposite.”
Up in Oregon, he and his brother discovered
the Williamette River. They were both asleep
on the front of the wagon, the horses stopped,
his brother woke up. “Will,” he said, “am it a river?”

My grandfather, he cooked for the army during the war,
the first one. He flipped the pancakes up the chimney,
they came right back through the window onto the griddle.
In the Depression he worked in a laundry during the night,
struck it rich in pocketknives. My grandfather,

he liked to smoke in his orange grove, as far away on the property
as he could get from my grandmother,
who didn’t approve of life in general, him in particular.
Smoking gave him something to feel disapproved for,
set the world back to rights. Like everyone else,

my grandfather sold his grove to make room
for Disneyland. He laughed all the way to the bank,
bought in town, lived to see his grandsons born
and died of cancer before anyone wanted him to, absent
now in the rootless presence of damp, black earth.

“Common Ground” by Paul J. Willis, from Visiting Home. © Pecan Grove Press, 2008.

“Aurora” by David Bengtson

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Today in the paper he reads about a woman named Aurora who
had told her husband, Raymond, that she wanted to be buried with
her beloved car. So Raymond made arrangements with the local
funeral home to purchase a row of fourteen plots, which he believed
to be more than enough for a 1976 Cadillac convertible. And he told
the backhoe operator to dig one long trench the length of those four—
teen plots and plenty wide-a trench with a dirt ramp at one end. For
Raymond, himself, would take the red Cadillac, white top down, for
its last ride from the church to the cemetery, where the pallbearers
would balance the casket across the trunk and backseat.
On that morning, as the first light spread its white wings across
the horizon, Raymond slipped the key into the ignition, started the
engine, pulled on the headlights, and transported his beloved Aurora
on the back of her favorite car, its golden lights pushing back the
darkness of this long highway.

“Aurora” by David Bengtson from Broken Lines. © Juniper Books.

“Who Was That Man?” by Paul Bussan

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I love those movies
About a stranger
Who rides into town
On the back of a horse,
And proceeds to start
A chain of events
That makes each person
Take stock of their lives,
So that after he’s gone
Everyone’s better
Or worse for the wear
Than they were
Before he arrived.

“Who Was That Man?” by Paul Bussan from A Rage of Intelligence: Poems. © PSB Publishing.