Aileen Cassinetto: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Aileen Cassinetto

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Aileen Cassinetto

Three Poems

This Burning Bush According to Ruth Waters

Call it a relief, this kind of blossoming,

carving pieces of hardwood logs into acts

of crossing. See the difference between

earlywood and latewood, how one is darker

and heavier. If you want the whole story,

look at the rings, you can always tell

when the years were good, and what was

endured when they were not. Do not go

between the vessels. Do not carve

against the grain. Welcome rain

with the generosity of trees.

This is how you cut the heart

without cracking, how you can hold it

palms up against all weathering.

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. 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.

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).