Dian Sousa: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Dian Sousa

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Dian Sousa

Three Poems

Joe and The Transatlantic Gods                                                                                   

In the last week of his life my dad dyed his hair a different color every morning.

By Sunday night it smoldered above his head, a crispy swatch of calico.

He was trying to disguise himself from the death about to enter

the ashen lounge of his tar encrusted heart.

His death, the Death named Joe, knuckle poised to knock,

like one of the colorless young Mormon men or like the little girl

in a grimly yellow party dress, her bored hand, manacled by her Jehovah

Witness father or her mother in a girdle and thick brown stockings

on a free blue Saturday when all the other children from school

were watching genius cartoons in which the only God was a large orange dog

or a giggly prepubescent ghost.

As the church people neared our house, my dad would look out the window

and say, here come the crusaders. He said the word crusaders in the filthy way

it should always be said.  And everything in him, so in love with the world—

guavas and figs, fado music, and bright fishing boats—would flash

its most feral grin.

He was born on an Azorean island a thousand miles out at sea.

His idea of God was the multi-shadowed Atlantic and its voluminous music.

His Gods contained volcanic caverns and choirs of mackerel robed in silvery hymns.

The Oceanic Gods, pagan and feasting, dangerous but visible, wholly present,

their slight commandments sang in the trill and whoop of a storm petrel.

Hunger, flight, song. Revel! You are brief but beautiful. Live!

When the talcum-powdered Mormon’s and the sweaty Witnesses knocked,

he would open the door, greeting them with the energy and menace of something huge,

frolicking in the depths until its hunger drove it to breech the surface and eat the unwitting.

Hey Crusaders, he would say, did you know they have found Heaven? 

What he meant was, It’s Saturday! Go home and revel!

But they could not hear his meaning, they could hear only a weird question

never once asked by any other person in the neighborhood,

Who? Who found Heaven, Joe? Who? Their question perched on the railing

of our front porch like an ecclesiastical barnyard owl inquisitor.

If the Mormons or the Witnesses could have drawn their mighty swords,

knocked him down, tied him to a chair, tortured out the name of his source,

and placed it on a frilly pillow as an offering it to their fragile,

stone-quiet God in hiding, they would have, even the little girl.

And he understood this, so his answer was just a laugh,

the laugh of a wildly beautiful wave about to break,

sweeping all distracted, all unrooted from the shore, gleefully.

Such glee. The laugh of his favorite God, the orca, mouth wide open

about to swallow another stunned and terrified seal.

El Mar de Nosotras                                                                                    

I never cry. Sometimes I do cry. But always in my sleep so I won’t go insane. It’s safe to cry there too and I’m never alone. Sometimes I am alone, until another woman shows up and then a 100 million. A few are free. Some are drunk. All are dreaming. Mis amigas there is a sea of us. Somewhere. Everywhere. Unmapped. An ocean of salt and vinegar. Cinnamon. Blood. Dreams we only talk about in dreams. An ocean of us. A thundering of us. (There are some men who say they cannot hear it. They say—in a primeval but tinny shriek, shriveled by the years—that it cannot exist. One little lord of doom was named Cortes. One Columbus. And I think there may have been a John a James a George a Don…Their names all run together in a savage mess.) Pero, amigas mías, sabemos que hay un mar de nosotras. We know there is a sea of us. Very deep. Very dangerous but we walk together on that sea floor. Easily. Because we are the sea. We are the seven oceans. We are the first ocean and in this ocean no one is crying. Well, some are crying but it is without pain. Our ocean sings. She rocks and cradles us. She knows how tired we are. Her floor is a carpet of circular flowers. They spiral and sway. They return time to its original swirl so we can dance to it—not be worked to death by it. The flowers open and close their cobalt mouths in the emerald current. We run our fingers across their petaled lips. We understand their language because it is ours too. It is potent. It is liquid. It moves without force. It moves by its own force. Love. Wave. Hurricane.

Captain America, Turn Up Your Hearing Aid 

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction

—William Blake

I saw you today praying over a TV

in the Department of Dead Electronics.

You were sobbing. Sad as an abandoned toaster.

Bereft as a motor-less blender.

I wanted to burst through the broken,

sliding glass doors and slap you

with the flaccid chord of a busted curling iron,

bludgeon you out of your sleepy belief

which breaks my heart.

I was your child. Remember me? The raggedy one?

Drawn not to light, but to fire?

I could not explain the difference,

but I could hear it in the slink of an imagined wolf,

in the flare and snap of late September.

Oh Captain, I wanted to love you like my friends did.

Our neighborhood abuzz with your name,

the houses hung with flags. But

I could always feel beyond the edges

of what you built, beyond,

to something breathing, mostly ­­silent, but true as dirt

I ate that dirt in a dark pie,

made a beard of it, mixed it with spit

and made a wig of it.

You turned the hose on me

as if it were not mud, but fire.

You gave me a dress. You brushed my hair

‘til it straightened, ‘til shined, ‘til it hurt.

You grabbed my neck and said,

Look at all the lights!

You saw

Improvement               Invincibility                  Christmas

I saw every pretty demon festooned and twinkling.

Author Bio:

Dian Sousa is a poet and activist. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals: The Prairie Schooner, The Banyan Review, Great Weather for Media, Kelp Journal, American Poetry Journal, The Gavea-Brown Journal of Portuguese American Poetry. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She’s the author of five books poetry. Several of her poems are being translated by the Imprensa Nacional in Lisbon. She hosts irregular poetry readings at The Center for Mystification and Delight. She is a San Luis Obispo poet laureate emeritus and the poet for all five years of The San Luis Obispo Women’s March. Her most recent book is Borracha Dreamland.