Georgina Marie Guardado: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Georgina Marie Guardado

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Georgina Marie Guardado

Three Poems

Only Temporary 

Georgina Marie Guardado

We never come into the answers, do we?

We don’t even talk about the questions: 

What’s next? Are we defining this? 

Am I getting off as much as you are? No. 

I longed for time away from home and headed toward 

mint ocean waves of Drake’s Beach. 

I drove past a single church in the woods, St. Cecelia’s,

past wild California lilac of Olema, its toxicity vivid,

followed a curvature of roads, their shape much like the outline

of my hips when you trace them with warm fingertips.

Acres of wild yarrow, miles of mustard flowers grow pathways 

to the Pacific, and to my version of church. 

I arrived. I sat on a pew of driftwood. I asked cracked sand dollars 

how long I can tolerate being only a temporary body. 

They didn’t answer back. I returned home, stopping along the way

to photograph oceanside flora: cow parsnip, blue blossom, common gorse. 

I just want to mean something to you, is what I daydream saying out loud

but I don't bother to learn how. 

On Joy and it’s Im/possibilities

Georgina Marie Guardado

When the autumn sun touched down tonight

over Clear Lake, the sky fed us a light show

of muted blues and pastel grays, tones of gold

and bronze that sent a reminder: there is

something always bigger than us, than elections,

than another sign of hate on the horizon.

Cloud forms bulged over Mt. Konocti

with no connection or reference to

the battles once fought on this land,

the erasure of a people. Their blood still

makes an entire island here.

Joy is impossible some days, as treacherous

a task as counting the number of bullets 

sprayed during the last mass shooting,

and until the next. They say you mustn’t suffer

over the suffering, but there is so much of it.

To find joy, I have to focus on the blinking lights

on lamp posts across the street to keep from

considering which war to fight tomorrow.

This rumination will be fleeting. I will be poised.

Though to shatter is just as acceptable.

Limantour

Georgina Marie Guardado

Taking a drive to find blue water

a place to drop off old bruises

I come across a heron floating above puddles of water  

flying into a field of spotted cows

by the inlet of Point Reyes.

A green-brown marsh outlines the ocean path

the bones of water collect bruises 

from the skin I wear before I make it to the coast

before I smell sweet salty air

and find heaven.

Where my dog and I become children

running in the sand, falling into sea foam

finding sand dollars and leaving them

right where we found them

in hopes the salt water gods will accept them

as innocent tokens, payment for more and more

days alive where together

we forget what it is to do

and bask in what it is to feel

happy.

Author Bio:

Georgina Marie Guardado is a Poet Laureate Emerita of Lake County, CA for 2020-2024, and a 2021 Poets Laureate Fellow with The Academy of American Poets. She is the Literacy Program Coordinator for the Lake County Library and President of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Gulf Coast Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, The Muleskinner Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, and more. She received her MFA from the Pacific University MFA in Writing program where she was a recipient of the Kwame Dawes Mapmakers and Master of Fine Arts Merit endowments. She resides in Northern California.