Chris Stroffolino: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Chris Stroffolino

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Chris Stroffolino

Five Poems

Love is Blinds

Pray a wordless sparrow wordless sorrow wordless shrink

A lot more night than I thought wind would mean

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Post-Conversation Sediment

for Laura (3.22)

Trying to remember what

we talked about sharing fears

sending music or books to friends

who may reject them like they’re us.

The political is the personal & injustice

takes the shape of the man

who accused you of stealing

the food you bought for him….

Oh world, world, so many dead

friends, yet I smile to remember

our little back and forth

about David’s line, “geometry

of a church in a cul-de-sac.”

“I’ve never seen one,” you said,

I don’t know if I have either,

but I can imagine, it’s white

and falling apart, perhaps

abandoned after they built the highway

that made its street a cul-de-sac.

Certainly not mega!

But, we both agreed, what’s

even better is that it can work

as a symbol, a dead-end street!

Poor church! Did we want to sit

with the bad boys in the back?

Cheap Skinned Thin Skate

My bedroom a convenience store, too bright,

people reaching over me for corn syrup pies

greedy garbage, as health insurance pries

when the water crisis is good for economy.

Good Friday Tax Day, Easter April Fool’s

Double meaning of fence & store,

Fencing fences store stores, sweep stakes.

I have taken encouragement from emojis

and have read books by people who died

long before I was born as personal attacks.

But I’m still amazed how others can tune

out the Muzak in the stores, and the ugly

sounds of praise so floated. Is wine-dark sea 

beautiful to those allergic? Should I replace stardust 

with eARTh sh*t, oh asteroid asterisk?

Light verse is an eye in a hurricane, but history

is an eye with no ears in the golden pyramid

head detached from the widening brick body

in whose bottom is a sarcophagus for serfing surps.

Conspiracies? Convenience? A womb of our own

in a soul-making vale. More people depressed

in the great depression, but a great recession

sounds more dental, vicarious biting teeth

to break us down smooth for the throat

of the men who are supposed to be heard not seen.

if I was hearing it wrong 

to fetishize life,

when all along you were

rooting for a happy

death, how can I help?

Q

Ever read/write in the half-shade when the shadow of the leaves are dancing on the notebook so warmly and energetically that the changing shapes of the light pulsing contrasts makes it really difficult to concentrate on the words? Ever then just give up & gaze at the source leaves and feel the animating breeze vicariously through them? The bright leaves are the dark shapes on my notebook, earth slowly turning on the radio and yikes it’s another version of that standard summertime….but this Eddie Jefferson one’s got a turmeric twist:

                                “Fish are jumpin out of the lake

                                 Trying to give the fisherman a break.”

I think that’s what the light/leaves/breeze was trying to tell me, but it looks ridiculously boring on the page on a bare lightbulb’s phone screen.

=======+

Before and After

1.

Where do we go, jet settler?

Celebration Florida is floated.

Space is the place, but you can

call it death, as if a peach

can be a buoy in the ocean

of your mouth---

2.

A drip? A drop? An ooze perhaps.

What is the beginning of the water cycle?

Creation myths leaping

Like salmon up the stream of consciousness

To the melting snows of Everest.

It never rains in the public restrooms of southern heaven.

Author Bio:

Chris Stroffolino has published 9 collections of poetry, most recently Medi(t)ations (Blaze Vox, 2025); in addition to releasing 4 albums of song, he’s also published a collaboration of music-themed poems with Steve Carll, Dreaming to a Click (2026, Bathysphere). His most recent collection of essays (primarily on 21st century poetry) is In The Here There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). More recently, Periodicities published his short essays on Virginia Konchan, Rae Armantrout, Johua Beckman and Juliana Spahr; conversations with Maxine Chernoff, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux and Adeena Karasick are forthcoming; poems are forthcoming in Hanging Loose and New American Writing. He lives in Oakland, CA. where he taught freshman composition and Creative Writing at Laney College from 2008 until February 2025, when he suffered a stroke.