Devreaux Baker: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Devreaux Baker

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Devreaux Baker

Three Poems

Love Letter

Dear World, this is a love letter I am writing for you

filled with sleepless nights, broken hearts,

and a broken-down truck on the highway outside

Kalispell Montana one summer night in a rainstorm

when a herd of elk moved like ghost water

on all sides of me and lightning gave them

ancestor features. This love letter has bruised knees,

newfound love, sex on a kitchen floor, living room couch,

air mattress or futon, in new mown grass, in waist high

yellow weeds, by the side of rivers, lakes, and on a trail

up to Half Dome.

Dear world I am writing this to say I will never be able

to get enough of anything you throw at me, crazy friends,

cheesy songs, rain on an abandoned shack’s tin roof,

the smell of skunk, pearl gray doves, red moons,

whales and grizzlies, mountains with monks.

I am filled to the brim with your kind of life

which translates roughly into some kind of crazy love

filled with blues and reggae, violin concertos

and drumbeats in a roundhouse. I am your sister,

mother, girlfriend, wife, lover and grandmother. 

I started out as your infant daughter cradled

on your breast. I am filling your love letter

with salmon berries, raspberries, huckleberries

and all the figs in my neighbor’s 100-year-old tree. 

Love me or hate me it’s all the same to me.

I will never give up on you. Your rivers are my veins,

your winds echo stories in my bones, your moon

has all our faces; black, white, pink, brown, red or yellow,

rolled into one serious glow and your mornings are filled

with so much soul, I over-dose the moment sunrise

wakes me.

Dear world, I’m unrolling my sleeping bag

under your grove of trees; redwood, eucalyptus, blue spruce

or live oak. I am bedding down with you the rest of our days

together, filled with broken-down trucks, the newly born

or the dead and dying.  You taste like dark chocolate

with a hint of red chili’s thrown in for spicy measure

so, when I eat you my heart beats stronger, brighter,

longer, faster.

Devreaux Baker

Woman Becoming World

This morning, I woke in the fragmented mind of the world.

High on an overdose of blue, I floated in camouflage above the fringes

of her mind, collecting talismans of grief and keepsakes of the dead.

I was an unfolding map of divide and conquer.

I woke at the 1,000-year-old table that stretched from one horizon to the next

where I sat down to break bread with snipers and monks, land barons

and environmentalists. I carried the Middle East, Mongolia, and Sudan, playing dice

in my anklebones, Ethiopia, Albania, Kazakhstan, mending tents in my finger bones.

Swept away by the smell of rain, I crouched on the Nile delta, trading stories

with the Tigris and Euphrates, carrying the smell of sumac and salt

cardamom and rosemary in my hair. Women’s voices rose and fell creating lifelines

stretching from the hallways of my pelvis throughout my arms and legs.

I carried the Antarctica in my shoulder bones, the icy rush and spill

of glaciers melting filled my ears with an uncanny song of midnight

opening her dress, offering her breasts one final time to the world.

I woke in the sleeping bag of ancient grief and wore the patched coat

of the dispossessed where songs spilled out of the seams and overflowed

my pockets with their own foot-stamping, hand-clapping notes that created

a nest of musical interludes and hatched once extinct birds longing for flight.

I woke in the spider web of lay lines crisscrossing the features of earth

defining time and space with ancestral features.

I carried long lost languages in my throat, held the taste of grit

from dying rivers on my tongue.

Embedded in the lap of winter, I slept the dream of polar bears conjuring

hard packed snow and glittering with ice in all the follicles of my hair.

This morning, I woke famished for that taste of some new beginning,

some uncharted water, some unclaimed terrain of the soul

marked with the fingerprint of a people anxious to be found, embraced

and understood in the fragmented mind of the world.

Devreaux Baker

River

The moment was swinging like a light in her arms

when she remembered she was a river.

The wind was creating havoc in the branches of her hair.

The tornado was dreaming spirals of cars and one or two

cows in her tunnel.

The rain was a hexagram of forgotten intentions.

The prayer was a small fist uncurling inside her mind,

her mind was awash with laundry to do and children to care for

when she remembered the tug and pull of currents inside her womb,

when she remembered shore birds creating hieroglyphs in her throat.

The husband was calling her name, the dog needed to go outside

the garden needed tending, the goats needed milking

when she remembered the smell of salt in every wave

and the bleak courage of stones on her south facing riverbed.

The trapped moon inside her face sent fractured light across her shore.

The wood needing stacking, the porch needed sweeping

the bills needed paying, the cat needed stroking

when she felt a generative wave beginning in her toes

when she remembered the beginning place of seeking and finding

when she felt the lucky tide of infinite possibilities

crash through the doorway of her soul

and set loose the tsunami of herself

and like a river she was finally flowing into the sea.

Devreaux Baker

Author Bio:

Devreaux Baker is the first Poet Laureate of Mendocino County and a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award for her book Red Willow People.  Her poetry collections include Hungry Ghosts, Red Willow People, Out of the Bones of Earth, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, and Light at the Edge. Her forthcoming book is Blue Requiem, Wild Ocean Press, San Francisco. Her work has been published in many journals and literary magazines including ZYZZYVA, the Paris Review, Feminist Studies in Religion, Poetry In Flight, Anthology in Celebration of El Tecolote, and the Canary Journal. She is Editor-in Chief of Spirit of Place: Mendocino County Women Poets Anthology and was producer of the Voyagers Radio Program of Original Student Writing for KZYX Public Radio with a Poetry Award from the California Arts Council. She has facilitated workshops and taught poetry and creative writing in many venues including public schools K-12 and directed national and international poetry workshops.  Her Awards and Honors include the 2025 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing in Poetry, the 2024 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the 2024 Steve Kowit Poetry Award, the 2022 Fischer International Prize for Poetry, the 2016 US Poets in Mexico Award, the 2012 Hawaii Council for Humanities International Poetry Prize, and the 2010 Women’s Global Leadership Poetry Prize. She is a MacDowell Fellow, a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellow, and a Hawthornden Castle Fellow. She currently produces the Mendocino Poets Reading Series at the Mendocino Art Center and is publisher of Wayfind Press. www.devreauxbaker.org