Kathryn Petruccelli: California Poets Part 9, Four Poems

Kathryn Petruccelli

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Kathryn Petruccelli

Four Poems

I Used to Live Close Enough to Smell Ocean

What intrepid bird has built a nest in each dead

swamp tree next to the highway?                          

Likely, once it sniffed water, its briny beak

arrowed toward home.

We creep along in our shiny metal boxes.

Lakes sit silent in their circumferences as if geometry

could scuttle away doubt. Here in New England, even

the weekend getaway traffic wants to believe it can Emerson itself

into a calmer nervous system. Nevermind the road speaks

its truth: brakelighting, asphalting, no-shouldering

mile after mile, until it gives out, collapses into the sea’s arms.

But we haven’t made it that far yet, haven’t made up

the perfect scenario—because isn’t it always vision

that lacks when worlds release before their time? Further on,

boggy reeds tickle guardrails, salt beaches air, longing

close at the car’s vents.

Green signs broadcast golf courses,

hyphenated towns—the ones without vacancies.

Only look, covet. Only wish. I’d ask how those people

got to live by exclusive jetties, what people do who live there,

but likely they’ve done and now are all porch & poodle, sunset

& lawncare. If I lived there, I’d let sand wash

across the welcome mat, let night waves take me under

wing, their sound a refrain:

We remember you.

Of Light and Loss

If I could believe in the yellow light of dawn, mornings

since mornings began trying softly to hold my hand.

Thousands arrive: tiny jellies brought in with the full-moon tide.

Diamonds strung in kelp. But an hour after I leave the sand

—cloud cover. To think of those necklaces once

startled with light.

If I could write unselfconsciously, the rain falling outside

the forecast’s prophecy.

Small towns are or aren’t enough—a café, a cannon, a band of beach.

Some places, even in daytime, headlights are required.

There’s no end to the list of names, no remedy for loneliness.

I ask an aquarium docent if belugas in the wild live in pods

like other whales, the tank’s single specimen swimming past and past us.

I don’t know, the young man confesses.

If I could take backroads home without flinching,

beach shack sandwich packed and ready.

A hundred. I look it up, right there

next to the tank. Why delay the inevitable? Belugas

move in groups of up to a hundred other whales.

I watch its white face—great bulb, star aura—

On Being Asked Whether I’d Exhausted That Subject Yet

Like Home is something to quit, like she

wouldn’t chase you down, mean-

bit and tragic, break her own neck

to get your pity, droop-eyed, dim, but always on

the far/not-far horizon, tucked under her wing—

a wallop, sulk, an ill-honed brick, ready

to drown you, sweetly, teeth-bared and sharp-

buckled, to profess her love for you as she

locks the iron around your ankle, intimate

malice, naming you Nothing 

at the mention of who you might have

become without her, cocking her head

back, hearth-mouth gaping in a cackle.

I stare into the dark vortex: source, abyss,

umbilicus.

Author Bio:

Kathryn Petruccelli holds an M.A. in teaching English language learners and a love of the stage. She’s passionate about getting contemporary poetry, particularly that of Poets of Color, in front of youth. Among the journals her work has appeared in are The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, RHINO, Rattle, Poet Lore, Catamaran Literary Reader, SWWIM, and Literary Mama. Nominated for a Pushcart 2024 & Best of the Net 2020, Kathryn is a past winner of San Francisco’s LitQuake essay contest and a finalist for the Omnidawn Broadside Poetry Prize. She lives with her family in the west of Ireland.