Jessica Barksdale: California Poets Part 8, Four Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Jessica Barksdale
Four Poems
Horoscope
Good news will come in not as good news but a challenge that will make you shudder from your tailbone to your eyelids. Try to not pass out, clutch your throat, fall to the floor in tears. It’s good news. Just thought you should know.
Your moon (not to mention every other planet) is in an odd position (like always) and some large luminous extraterrestrial body is in retrograde. That’s why you feel like jumping on your rooftop and pulling out your hair or setting it on fire. Relax, already. The spheres will sphere away.
Feel like lying? That is your astral body sliding into your corporeal one for an instant or two. That skinny minx is itching for a fight. Wow, and the things she makes you say. Amazing.
You will receive a voice message from an absent friend, and I mean, really absent. As in dead. When you hear it, it’s real. Of course, no one will believe you and some will consider calling 911. But listen closely. She always said you were worth more. She encouraged the hard thing. You’ve not believed or done either, at least, not until last week. She’s probably wanting to congratulate you! Take notes.
A close relative will relate extraordinary news: someone is pregnant, finally. There is new employment on the horizon (about time). That will? Updated to include you again, despite the mess up with the Norway trip and all that bad blood over the nonrefundable cruise deposit. And we won’t even talk about the novel you wrote that unpacked the family secret.
The nights will be short, your sleep even shorter. You will toss and turn in the bed that is now your own. You will look out the window and think: my street, my driveway, my tree, though the my in all is questionable. You will walk into the kitchen and make your coffee, the grounds at the bottom of the cup portending nothing but absent coffee.
Pet the black cat. Walk under the ladder. Break a mirror. The worst has happened, and look, here you are. You will continue to survive until you don’t. Why not make it okay? Call a friend, ride a bike. Hope for tomorrow, which will be another day. Live into it anyway.
Whipped
It was important to be unconscious during
major holidays, the homemade eggnog
(my alcoholic grandmother’s recipe) providing
only a tiny nod to dairy. First bourbon, brandy,
and finally whole milk. Cream. Whipped
egg whites, a froth of delicious poison doled out
by tablespoons to children to conjure deep sleep
while Santa—that lovely lie—delivered his gifts.
Years later, I made it for my adult children, and
the grog was deemed the best ever. I never
stirred it up again, something unreal that night
about the floor, the ceiling, the bright Christmas
lights. All of us too happy, too calm, sitting in the
vast living room that overlooked the cypress trees,
Oakland spread out like a civic hallucination. How
hopeful I was for this tradition to sweep up my new
marriage, this new family, two stepdaughters with friends,
partners, all of whom liked me, my sons, my family.
We were a cobbled tribe built on a fissure, a marriage
that would not hold. Here I am, typing from another
house, another place, holding down my own life,
ignoring a tradition that will never occur again
in this lifetime, the recipe card folded up in the
back of a drawer, magic gone.
At Least There are Dragons
I want to believe in something, so I log onto match.com,
my new religion. It has replaced the real estate
site in my top ten timewasters, right up there
with scrolling through birthday photos taken by people
I will never meet IRL. I want to love someone,
but I’m too tired to take off my clothes and pretend
to be okay with my body. What a mess, all that aging.
So I’ll watch a TV show I can barely take in, too much gore,
but at least there are dragons. I want to be happy, but
recent essays explain happiness is a ridiculous proposition.
Hobbes wrote that life would be solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short, but I hoped he was lying. I hoped
he had hope. I want to know what the hell is going on,
but instead, I’ll take the pruners and go outside
to the pumpkin patch. I’ll trim away the big leaves,
harvest the tiny baking pumpkins and then make
a pie, something I can handle, touch, and eat.
Maybe I want for it all to be over, but what I mean
is that I want the hard work to end. I want to be
in the place where I breathe into the rest of time,
which promises clear sailing and fine weather.
But that’s not possible, so I will settle for unease,
the chop, the crushing waves against the boat of my life.
I want the concussion of living.
I want the sharpness of it all.
I don’t want it to stop.
I Write My Future
My son tells me to be mindful. Craft carefully. He winks, remembering how I erased his former girlfriend in novel three. What did I do to her? Got her accepted to a college in a cold city, wind whipping as she looked out the large window onto the frozen lake. I’m nasty that way, just as I was to myself when one of my characters left her perfectly good husband to take up with a man who would only reveal his dark side late in the narrative, which is now for me, my husband permanently back east eating cake with his family. What else? The mother with a declining brain, the sister living Down Under, the uncle who is really a brother. Don’t write anything crazy, my son says, now that he is single again, broken up with the woman I wrote for him at the end of the frozen lake novel, a sparkly, wisecracking pixie, a wickedly smart writer, that character. But I ended the novel, and things went off track in real life. So here is what I write now: the main character will be happily alone for a couple of years (she can’t wait forever—she a ragged hen with missing tail feathers). She pulls weeds in her garden, paddles canoes in rivers and lakes, invites people over, sees movies, and watches birds with her new, enormous binoculars. But that man in the other canoe, the one she likes? She finally asks him to coffee. I’m not going to write more and ruin it for them, yanking both down a tragic relationship superhighway. This story won’t be interesting. Nothing for a poem or a novel. Just a tale about two people who do some things and keep on living until they don’t, the last word finally read. Poof! Off they go, a wisp of nothing much. Don’t make so much of the ending, my son says.
Author Bio:
Jessica Barksdale’s sixteenth novel What the Moon Did was published February 2023 by Flexible Press. Her short story collection Trick of the Porch Light was published September 2023. She’s published three poetry collections: When We Almost Drowned (2019), Grim Honey (2021), and Let’s End This Now (2024).
She taught at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and continues to teach for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University.
She lives in Vancouver, Washington.
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