Jessica Goodheart: California Poets Part 10, Four Poems

Jessica Goodheart

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Jessica Goodheart

Four Poems

No Motion like Flight

I’ve come from bedlam and want the train

from there to where I’m going to sing

of nameless waterways.

Behind me: the night of the long tantrum.

Out the window: warehouses, yellowed grass,

trees still bare from winter’s pain.

A summer home set back on marshland rushes past.

Come July, mosquitoes will be everywhere.

For now the train says this: escape, escape—

a hissing ballad of moving on.

The train’s like me.

It wants the tunnel’s sudden dark.

Wants away, wants elsewhere --

the fix of church spire, school yard,

redbrick mill barely glimpsed.

The armrest is the hard bed I crave,

the crossword and its numbered list.

Come Providence, come New Haven.

Come afternoon’s surprise of light.

Even for the earthbound,

there’s no motion like flight.

Russian Doll

All five dolls mattered but last smooth girl,

sitting snug inside her sisters

she’s the one I wanted most to see

as I knelt on the floor unpacking girl from girl.

On visits to my grandparents’ flat,

I’d fly to the little room with the trundle bed

and rescue her from the bellies of the bigger dolls–

each of their gargantuan bodies, garish

with painted flowers, each of their cheeks –

improbable circles of gaudy pink. I’d let my finger

trace their rough insides. Each smelled of birch.

Each wore a kerchief, like my grandmother’s

grandmother still wears in a photo on my mantel.

They were all lovely in their shine,

each too considerate for arms—

which would only get in the way of the main job:

virgin birth, repeated and repeated.

And then, lastly, my stowaway–

I’d hold her trim yellow body up to the light,

study her painted garment—more modern, more abstract

than those of her sisters: a red streak down her front,

like a man's tie, a black scribble of hair.

I’d tug at her, wanting to find an even smaller girl

inside of her, but she had to be enough—

my prayer bead, my own lost self.

Hillside Living

On rainy days, we hear the rev and sputter.

Cars climbing our hill lose traction, one after another.         

For the lady with the popped tire, we pour

coffee as she frets in a chair by the door.

We offer the mail carrier, whose truck slid

and toppled our trash, wrecking the lid, 

forgiveness. An SUV hauling pizzas up the hill

skids on that spilt cocktail of rain and engine oil.

The truck, wedged against the curb, shrieks

and grinds, as if gears could know grief.

Out our window, we spy the driver pacing, aslant,

a man who needs to think and can’t.

Soon shoulder to metal and drenched, 

he’s fighting the laws of physics and good sense.

By now, a pair of front-porch Cassandras,

we are shouting, No! as the poor man heaves

his weight against his truck before agreeing to a tow.

Like bodies in a trunk, his pies grow cold.

After that, it’s too much. We draw the curtains and retreat.

We can’t save all the pizza men sliding down our street.

Existential Crisis 

Suddenly, everything was unprecedented.

Even the rain couldn’t be trusted.

Recipes lost their authority.

Suddenly, the thermostats were out of whack.

Street signs led nowhere. Friends became

unreachable. Crying more fitful,

laughter forced. It was a time of rupture. 

Some had waited for this.  It gave them glee, this undoing,

this pulling apart. Oceans thronged shorelines,

rivers jumped their banks. Sunsets unsettled the skies.

It had never been like this.  Now it was always this way.

The whole planet wrapped in bright ribbons

of chatter, a disharmony of whispers.

Always alarmed, we didn’t care anymore.

Some died. Yes, but the living.  

They huddled in the catacombs of marriages.

They clung together, bound

by an ancient politics of anger.

We baked hallucinations

on brittle parchments of light.

It’s hard to explain – this shipwreck,

this shortness of breath, this cacophony

of headlines and chatterboxes, the tinny end-times

music ringing in our heads,

the flatlining, the fires, and still

the earth, its persistence, its trembling.

Author Bio:

Jessica Goodheart is a Pasadena-based journalist and poet. Her poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, The Best American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. She is an editor at Capital & Main, a nonprofit newsroom in Los Angeles. Her poetry collection, Earthquake Season, was published by Word Press.