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

Interview

January 14th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Devreaux Baker, Poet, Writer, Teacher, Performer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: In 2024, you were appointed the poet laureate of Mendocino County? What are some of the projects, events, or readings you’ve organized up to this point and what are your plans for this year?

DB: I was very honored to be appointed the inaugural poet laureate for Mendocino county. Our county is very large and towns are spread from the coast inland to Ukiah, Willits and Covelo, so it is a large diverse community to serve as laureate. I was excited by the prospect of creating “bridges” of communication through the use of poetry that links these coastal and inland towns. The first project I created was to organize a monthly county-wide open mic poetry series. I thought it was important to invite poets from across the county to come and share their work and felt that in this way a “bridge” of sorts was being created through both the written and spoken word. The format of that series is to feature one or two poets for the first hour and follow that with an open mic. This is a project that I hope will be on-going after my term as poet laureate ends.

As a second county-wide laureate project, I invited all the women poets of the county to submit poems that reflected what spirit of place meant to them. I know many people have been drawn to live in the county for a myriad of reasons and I wanted to focus on what individual poets (focusing on the women writers) chose to write poems about that could capture the essence of that phrase. As a result of that call for submissions I had over one hundred women poets from across the county respond and I was able to publish the "Spirit of Place: Mendocino County Women Poets Anthology."

A third laureate project was an off-shoot of that anthology and that was to create my own press, Way Find Press, in order to continue to publish county-wide broadsides, books or chapbooks.

A current laureate project that is one I am working on now and will continue into the third year of my laureateship. This project is to do collaborations with the Living Lands Trust and create poetry of the land. In this way the county can be represented with poetry that is reflective of both coastal and inland tracts of land. I have just completed the first group of poems for an international anthology that will be published by the Living Lands Trust and am excited to expand upon that idea with the creation of broadsides that can be displayed throughout the county.

DG: Mendocino County features some of the most beautiful, striking nature California has to offer. What are your favorite places and where would you take someone visiting for the first time?

DB: I have many “favorite” places in Mendocino County. I live on the coast and feel very drawn to the headlands and beaches. However every time I drive through Anderson Valley and feel the climate shift into a warmer or drier environment filled with its own unique flora, then I feel equally drawn to the inland areas. I suppose I can’t just name one place or the other. I feel fortunate to have access to many trails that lead through redwood groves and encompass river lands or creek beds. I love to kayak and feel anyone coming to the coast should explore the rivers as they are filled with life cycles all their own which are truly inspiring.

DG: Who are some of the people you’d like to mention working to support Mendocino’s literary community, institutions, or programs in general, and what literary resources exist to make writing more possible?

DB: Mendocino County has a long history of writers and poets living and working together to create a vibrant literary scene. I think currently poetry is having a resurgence across our country in general and certainly it is happening in Mendocino County as well. I would have to mention all the open poetry mics that are current in every town as very important in helping support and keep the flame of poetry burning. We have local poetry radio programs which encourage poets to send in their recorded work to be aired as well as an on-going yearly county-wide poetry reading which features poets from across the county performing their work.  We have a local yearly haiku festival based in Ukiah that is also widely attended. I would have to mention Dan Roberts on KZYX and his on-going Rhythm Running River Poetry Program as a huge support to poetry in the County.

DG: Let’s stay with the Golden State and talk about California Poets in the Schools. How did teaching in the program influence your own work and what was the curriculum like?

DB: I began working with California Poets in schools initially going into classes from the elementary level through high school and was very inspired not only by the student’s enthusiasm and willingness to jump into poetry but also by the support that the organization offered its poets in schools. I always felt it was very important to attend the poets in schools retreats to not only network with other poet educators in the city, but to also share ideas for working with students, and to access ways to help poetry become more widely accepted within the community at large. I think it is important to demonstrate that poetry is reflective of life and to be encouraged by the poets in schools program to further that message from the schools out into the community was truly a gift for me. As a result of doing that work I received a California Arts Council Grant to produce an original radio program of student writing titled “The Voyagers” which aired on KZYX and featured my students reading original poems from elementary school through high school.

DG: In Oaxaca, Mexico, you had the opportunity to read alongside Latin American poets and writers. How did the trip come about and what did you enjoy most about it?

DB: My trip in Oaxaca, Mexico came about because of the U.S. Poets in Mexico Program. Every year this program invited top poets to conduct poetry readings and seminar workshops in different cities in Mexico with Latin American poets. The program held a poetry contest and the winning poet was invited to come to Oaxaca, and have a reading with the poets who were featured. It was an extraordinary honor to be awarded that prize where I met so many amazing and inspiring poets from around the world. For me especially meeting Latin American poets was the highlight of my trip and made me realize the importance of cross-cultural sharing of work. I continue to be inspired by that idea and love the idea of continuing to travel to other countries, do readings, listen to local poets read, and network about the importance of poetry throughout the world. I feel that is extremely important now.

DG: How do collections take shape for you? Red Willow People emerged from the Helene Wurlitzer Writing Fellowship, which took you to Taos, but what about your other collections? Do you begin with an idea and write poems to accommodate it, or does the act of composing the poems themselves shape the book?

DB: You ask how collections take place for me and that is always a bit mysterious to me. When I was in residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation I was immersed in learning about the different cultures in Taos.  I met members of the Taos Pueblo who welcomed me into their homes and lives and were truly inspirational to my creation of the poems in Red Willow People and since I was living there for three months I had the opportunity to immerse myself in the land, the stories and the cultures which shaped that book. That was a rare gift. As far as my other collections they usually come about from a period of writing that seems to reflect what I am going through at that point in my life. I look at my collections now and can see these different period in my life and in a way they have begun to look like road maps of my life. That sounds funny to say but I do see how poems from different times in my life reflect so clearly who I was at that point in time, and as we are always changing, it is interesting to note that about myself. I write every day and never begin with any one thing in mind. For me the process is more akin to sitting down and letting whatever flows out come. And I might go with that for a while and then suddenly it is as though the door opens to the real poem waiting on just the other side and I begin writing it. Of course, I have been in groups with writers where we might use different exercises to write poems but for me in my own creation process, I am much more fluid and actually that has always felt the most natural way for me to write.

DG: Your poems often employ longer lines but you’ve also written in a shorter style. When it comes to the former, does the way you enunciate each word in a reading tend to change, or is it fairly consistent most times?

DB: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think the way I enunciate each word in a reading changes …. I think for me it is more consistent with the emotion behind the word, the driving force that prompted the particular word in the first place remains steadfast.

DG: You have spoken about your love for collaborating with visual artists. What work have you done in this respect and are there projects, perhaps, that you now have in mind that you’d still like to do?

DB: I have always loved collaborations with artists, musicians and even dancers. I have worked closely with several artists to create poems that are written in direct response to their art but have also done shows where the artist is given a poem and creates art to go with the written word. I recently participated in a group show in Fort Bragg California, “Art as Poetry, Poetry as Art” where the work was displayed in a Gallery and artist and poet spoke about the creation of the work. It was very exciting. However we decide to work with one another, I feel the importance in that is the exchange of energy that occurs. I have recently been working with an amazing artist to create broadsides and will be having a show of that work in the coming Fall. I love the simplicity of using one poem on some beautifully textured paper and then turning it over to an artist to create art on the same page so you literally have this very alive, very fluid exchange happening right there on the page and it is very accessible for an audience.

DG: What are you reading at the moment?

DB: My reading choices at the moment are very eclectic.  I seem to be re-reading some work from years ago which I periodically do and always find that so interesting.

I am reading Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Rome: A History of Seven Sackings by Matthew Kneale, A Month In Siena by Hisham Matar, The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, and Voices and Visions, The Poet in America edited by Helen Vendler.

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