Kathleen Winter: California Poets Part 10, Four Poems

Kathleen Winter

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Kathleen Winter

Four Poems

The Actual Party

Imprisoned here for over three years

(on the ground floor, not even

a tower) in the Castle of Solitude

with only one keeper (the dog

gone since December) and having

no bathtub, I take life and limbs

in hand just to shave in the shower.

But tonight I dream . . . we’re having

an actual party: serving something raw

with frigid bottled alcohol like the Swedes

entomb in ice. Also, marzipan animals,

delicately colored. We suffer smoking:

Holly Golightly, Traveler,

waves her long-stemmed cigarette—

she can light her next one

on a floating candle.

Pale peonies luminesce

like Sargent’s golden garden lanterns.

Naturally Greg invited the kind folks

and I invited the wits. Those candles

start everyone talking, asking

Where were you when your house

burned down? When it yearns

to get out, wit is lava.

Above the spread, the tallest fir

hurls its branches like the Hydra.

Don’t forget the sfortzando

that accompanies it—

this last extravagance thrills me,

so Awful. What else to serve?

Something clarified in butter.

Three shining caterers in armor.

The party rolls on so long that

somebody starts a war and somebody

ends another. For hours, late guests

keep arriving. Near the end of the night

those of us left are barefoot;

we never can find our mules.                                                                   

I have a bottomless martini,

a topless bathing suit—

O the endlessness—

what actually ended the dream.

Cento: Material Girl

My objects dream and wear new costumes,

all bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

So various, so beautiful, so new.

The stores were bright, and not too far from home.

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

at a table with silver

that brightens, so well, our dark day,

we are, I am, you are

in love with stuffs, silks,

looking out from my long floral porch

as if this were necessary. The reason,                                                                          

“For Beauty,” I replied—

it is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes.

How else to feel other than I am?

I sit outside in the gold lamé of the moon.

Anne Sexton, William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, John Koethe, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Jane Kenyon, Dana Levin, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Marvin Bell, Carl Phillips, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hass, Gregory Corso, Charles Wright

Disenchantment

                        If God were not God, he would be the King of Spain

                        and the King of France would be his cook.

   — Spanish proverb

Long ago in Granada 

I was sous chef to the King

of France, chef of the King

of Spain. They paid okay.

We had lovely ingredients,

the purest lamb,

but everybody was unhappy.

My heart starved for the starving

artist’s life of time,

my boss pined for pools of sunlight

on the floors of Versailles,

and the King of Spain

was a bitter customer,

always wanting to be God.

Past Pastoral:  Dobie Paisano Ranch

Michael Adams was alive that year

to grant us a score of Friday nights

on the river-rock porch under the County’s

stars before you got divorced, before Wade

moved away, long after Marisa’s crash

we gathered bivalves in the creek bed,

as many limestone hearts as mammals shifting

in mesquite beyond the yellow porchlight

filtering June evenings when ice lost instantly

to whiskey and silence never had a chance

against the cicadas or lion’s scream from up

the canyon, call of the caged quite like

a call of the wild, to city ears.

Dawn on weekdays, hair wrapped in a towel

like Nefertiti’s crown, bathrobe for gown,

I’d stand on the stream-smoothed porch

barefoot, share a coffee with the borrowed

glory of all that acreage awake with rising light.

Before the rains, alone till the weekends

with only rattlesnakes to locate and beguile,

I named my poisons. Now Michael’s five years

dead. The ranch’s expanse lures a city’s

monied makers of change. That summer?

Flooded like a dammed stretch of the Nile.

Author Bio:

Kathleen Winter is the author of three poetry books: Transformer, a finalist for the 2021 Northern California Book Awards and winner of the Hilary Tham Prize; I will not kick my friends; and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her next full length collection is forthcoming from Texas Review Press, which published her chapbook Cat’s Tongue in 2022. Her poems have appeared in The New Statesman, The New Republic, Yale Review, The Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and AGNI. She was granted fellowships at Cill Rialaig, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Maison Dora Maar, the James Merrill House, and the Heinrich Böll Cottage. Kathleen lives in Northern California and serves as an associate editor for the journal 32 Poems.