Aileen Cassinetto: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Aileen Cassinetto

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Aileen Cassinetto

Three Poems

A Theory for Everything

                             I feel like giving birth to a thousand stars.

                   But to do this, I would need the energy

        of collapsing giants, which is roughly equal

                      to the energy a whole galaxy gives off

            in one year. I’m trying to make sense of it all

   because bringing anything of value

                        into being is an alchemy

            of gravity and, dare I say, insanity,

 I mean, just look at the big picture.

                   And then my eight-year-old niece asks

           if there is a God, and while it is human

to wonder, I wish she had been unquestioning

                    a bit longer. Already a big picture

        thinker, she plays Civilization VI

                        like a boss, settles cities, builds science hubs,

           decides which of her cities get her governors,

                     in other words, owns it like a queen.

In my present of past and future things,

                             time is porous, and I can feel cramps

               migrating to my lower back. I have

     a theory that the same gravity which binds

                    galaxies orients us in utero,

          a precarious suspension held long enough

  to wrestle stability from chaos.

               But we can’t always be precise. I wonder

                          if everything from near-nothing keeps unfolding

          with a force equal to the energy of whole

galaxies. Love, look at the big picture and just

                   tell me how to capture light from the void, hold

                                  the thread of everything as a child tends

          her tiny cities like a queen of galaxies.

Liturgies of Flight

A day of small things unfolds with a wing-

         span wide enough to lift a fledgling’s

              drooping wing as I kneel on my untamed yard

                     to bury kitchen scraps, three feet away

                             from the beans and leafy greens, this corner

                                     a eulogy to feathers and bird bones.

                    Everything is outbound, like winged seeds

             and pollen even my colony of flightless

        fruit flies. Some things are glory bound,

like an aircraft surviving landing on water

                  after colliding with a flock of birds.

       Of all days, perhaps, today I need to believe

   in how good things can work together, like a patch

of catnip breaking a young bird’s fall.

Malady 

Don’t be fooled.                                                 The poor farms never truly ended,

rather, the old systems have been perfected  and legislated into this big band-aid bill

of burden that brings us full circle                              with the old sins of exclusion.

Who said 70 million lives are mere minutiae,         that you have to prove your worth

to merit a basic right,                                             as though survival must be earned,

as though dignity must be justified.                   

This wound spreads                                                 like a bacterial bloom,

a cluster of rot                                                             and colored dots shocking the system,

like small betrayals of the body,                           like gossip in our bones.

Remember the poor farms                                       were a last resort,

their epidemics                                                         a malady of poverty.

In the Ledger of Orphans,                                   Half-Orphans and Others

                                                                             Receiving Public Support Payments,

pauper was an occupation,                                  and labor, a condition of care.

What blossomed                                                         were minutiae of our chronic pathologies.

Let go of our indignities.                                    Is there a doctor in the house.

Author Bio:

Aileen Cassinetto is a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and winner of the 2025 Foley Poetry Prize. The author of An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders and Bodies of Water (2025), she is also co-editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (2023) and The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025).