Emily Pinkerton: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Emily Pinkerton

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Emily Pinkerton

Five Poems

Bedbound poem

Some days I feel I am simply winding down the clock

on my own life. Days of anticipation, a lone rose

by my record player, reaching toward the sun.

Sustained by the gray meat of winter, I watch pink clouds

above red leaves, faint blush of quickening twilight.

Stability

I saw a morning star. Its point broke off

in my hand. It smelled like pine and sugar.

I ran a hand through my hair

as I wondered what else to do.

Eastern Seaboard

A moth’s wings beating through motes of illuminated evening dust.Inky-black waves crash in the distance, powerful and fast. Your name echoes through the walls, lilting against the speaker’s teeth. His hands are rough but his manner is tender. Slightly sorrowful, too. Regret is an idiom he has known, has chased away in long miles driven by night, but fear still lingers, beating, beating, beating like the waves against the battered shore. I wonder if the sea is more calm or restless. I suppose it depends on the day. The moth flies up toward the light and circles. It only knows what it is drawn to, and who can fault it. The motes of dust shimmer and float away.

Extraordinary promises

Whisper to me in your rhythmic baritone. Don’t think of time.

We only have what we have. May as well be rich with it.

Enough reverb on your guitar to make it sound like a harp,

And still you sing of flowers. All your extraordinary promises

Came true. How does it feel. Is it beautiful beyond the horizon,

The way you expected? Is there room for us?

Liar’s portions

Oil-slick sheen on the water, iridescent and swirled.

Synthetic sounds like a maze to wander through.

Look to the sky and ask for something better. Go on,

Before you regret it. Shards of a broken mirror litter the floor

Like last night’s sequins and you never expected to dance

Amongst anything else. Don’t count me out yet.

I keep time like I keep score: meticulously or not at all.

Don’t ask me what you deserve. I haven’t decided yet.

Author Bio:

Emily Pinkerton (she/they) is a writer with very severe disabilities. They live and write in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and their writing has previously appeared in Pome, ZYZZYVA, Juked, BlazeVOX, Foglifter, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others.

Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, 2018) and Adaptations (Nomadic Press, 2018; Black Lawrence Press, 2023). Her full-length collection, All Hazards, was selected as a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Award. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from The Writers Grotto and Alley Cat Books in San Francisco, and USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway.

More of Emily's publications can be found at thisisemilypinkerton.tumblr.com, on Bluesky (@poetryfriend), or on instagram (@thisisemilypinkerton).