Kathryn Petruccelli: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Kathryn Petruccelli

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Kathryn Petruccelli

Three 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.

Interview

January 14th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Kathryn Petruccelli, Poet, Writer, Teacher, Performer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to begin with a podcast you’re working on that’s going to debut this year and which is called “Melody or Witchcraft.” The primary focus will be Emily Dickinson. Could you talk a bit more about how you’ll organize it and if you already have certain guests lined up?

KP: Thanks for this question! Yes, “Melody or Witchcraft” should be out in just a couple weeks (February 9th, 2026). I have season one recorded and I’ve started scheduling guests for season two. I chose folks that have work that was in some way influenced by Emily Dickinson. Season one guests are Katie Farris, Nuala O’Connor, Barbara Mossberg, Tina Cane, Jennifer Franklin, and Tacey M. Atsitty.

We begin each episode with a Dickinson poem that my guest has chosen and then, after some discussion, move on to a poem of their own. The thought is to begin with Dickinson but broaden out to the larger ideas of creative influences and literary ancestors. I’m super interested in how inspiration works and what shape it takes as it moves from the moment of discovery by a reader to the production of more art—perhaps years later. Each episode, of course, takes its own path depending on the guest.

In my workshops over the last few years, I’ve been very focused on contemporary poets and what’s being written right now. It is imperative to honor the dynamism of this socio-political moment and listen particularly to Poets of Color. I hope this new turn via the podcast to look harder at voices from the past can be an added resource for a world that requires all the help it can get.

Dickinson is such a touchstone for so many, so she made sense as a starting point. I also feel a bit driven to do what I can to expand the idea of Dickinson from what we were traditionally fed about her for so long. She was a rebel and a woman of great self-agency. We need to be alert to questioning how history is handed to us. The implications of how we deal with history go way beyond one writer from 19th Century New England.

DG: You actually worked as a tour guide for the Emily Dickinson Museum. When did you begin doing this, how would you describe the job, and to what extent were visitors also poets?

KP: Mine was the first cohort of guides trained post-COVID. It was the perfect job for me. I got to nerd out about poetry and story all day while hosting groups in Emily Dickinson’s own home. I got to recite poetry and entertain. It was dreamy. The guides are given a good bit of freedom to focus the tours on the things that personally interest them. You could go half a dozen times and learn new things each time depending on your guide.

We had the full range of visitors at the Museum. I had super fans who arrived in white dresses and wept throughout the tour and I also had very bored people who drove someone else or thought they’d kill time. I think a fair number of visitors did some writing, taught in some capacity, and/or had a strong connection to Dickinson’s work.

DG: How did teaching in various capacities help your creative development? What were the challenges, and in what settings did you feel the greatest freedom to organize your curriculum?

KP: Any time you have to distill a concept or design a creative approach to something in order to teach it, it gives back to the person doing the teaching. It’s a way to reflect and slow down, and it sometimes offers wildly new insight depending on how it’s received. Maybe it sounds basic to say, but meeting people through teaching also provides you with life experience and genuine experience of day-to-day is of course the raw material of writing. I’m thinking most particularly here of teaching English to agricultural workers in California and also of teaching first-year college students—two different groups but both in their own way in very vulnerable positions. It was a privilege to get to know these students.

For sure the workshops I teach now, online, are the ones that have provided the most freedom. They started in May of 2020 as a way to help myself and a small group of friends through COVID. I thought we might do it for a month, but it lasted a year. After that, they encouraged me to offer it to the larger community.

It was a real revival for me personally as far as teaching goes. I was burning out both because of the intensity of the work and because after earning my degree in teaching English language learners, I analyzed everything I did very harshly. With the university writing classes, assessment is its own devil. With these online poetry classes, I retaught myself how to keep the love of the work primary and not give away all my energy.

DG: Teaching also means being teachable, and throughout your career, you’ve had the opportunity to work with poets like Ellen Bass and Danusha Laméris. How did this shape your creative outlook and what are specific things you appreciate about each aforementioned poet’s work?

KP: Both these women are solid, narrative poets, and whether or not what I’m writing a narrative piece, their examples inform the backbone of what I do.

I think Ellen calls some of her workshops “The Living Room Talks,” but I was taking them when they were actually in her physical living room! Ellen is a straight shooter when it comes to feedback; she’s not going to hand hold. She was always extremely generous with us in sharing drafts of her own work and helping us take in how a poem moves to its final form. In terms of her work, she’s a master of detail and loves to include facts or parse out the scientific minutia of a subject. That speaks to me.

When critiquing, Danusha tends toward imagining what a draft wants to grow up to be, which is very affirming. Danusha’s own poetry is extremely skillful in how it pairs beauty with ache, lushness with the brutal realities of loss. You are able to revel in knockout description and a genuine love of the world, while understanding that your speaker’s path to that place was hard-won.

DG: Having lived in a variety of places, you again decided to relocate in August 2023—this time Ireland. What prompted the move and to what extent have you made inroads with the poetry scene in your community?

KP: Yes, I’ve lived in Ireland for the last two and a half years. I very much wanted my kids to have the experience of living abroad. I also wanted them away from lockdown drills and campus shootings.

I have much more to still discover in the literary landscape here, which feels exciting. I’ve been making my way to various readings and have found a few folks to exchange work with. I’ve also been lucky enough to have work published a couple times now in the Galway-based journal, Ragaire Magazine, and I always enjoy attending their issue launches. (Ragaire is the old Irish word for “someone who likes to wander at night.”) Galway has a wonderful international literary festival every April that I haunt as well.

DG: Has your writing changed as a result of the move? And are you writing more or less?

KP: It’s hard to determine “more” or “less” because we’re always juggling things within the phases of writing, aren’t we? Generating, revising, submitting, new projects. I’d say right now I’m not writing as much as I’d like to be because of busy bits going on in the family and because the podcast project is taking up a lot of time. I also miss the tiny little ad-hoc writing studio I used to have in my backyard in the States. That room of one’s own thing is the real deal.

I write about rain a lot more now than I used to! Ha! I’m in many ways a writer of place, so my where matters.

DG: Performance is a huge part of your repertoire—voice, movement, and action are key. To what extent do you change the way you read poems each time and what are factors which influence the decision? Are they based on environment, the audience, the venue, a combination?

KP: I like this question a lot. I’m always thinking about how I’m delivering the work in the moment, even when differences might appear slight. Maybe there are different words I’m lingering over or pausing or not pausing at either because of the mix of factors you mentioned or because of the context of the other poems—if there are other poems—and what kind of story they are telling in relationship to one another.

DG: Is the first poem you wrote also the first one you performed, or were they different?

KP: Hmm. Yes, I think it was the same poem. It was a poem that grappled with how to grow to be more centered and calm, but still keep an edge – in other words still be spontaneous and authentic. I was 20-something wondering that—I still have the same question!

DG: Apart from performing and writing, you’ve also worked on an anthology of poetry by rival gang members. How did that come about and is it still in print?

KP: Ah, that was a project just for the school I was teaching with. I was put in a classroom of juvenile hall boys. I had to be careful what color my pencils were. A tough crowd, but not as tough as their girlfriends whom I also taught!

DG: What are you reading at the moment?

KP: Gallivanting with Words: How the Irish Speak English by Colm O’Regan because I’m a word nerd through and through. I brought back a pile of poetry books from my trip to the U.S. this past summer, but seem stuck on Keetje Kuipers’ latest collection, Lonely Women Make Great Lovers. And finally, I love short stories and have just been re-reading Robin Black’s collection from several years ago, If I Loved You I Would Tell You This. So good.

Author Bio:

Kathryn Petruccelli is a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions-nominated writer who holds an obsession with the ocean and an MA in teaching English language learners. You can find her work in places like West Trestle Review, Tinderbox, SWIMM, RHINO, Fictive Dream, and SweetLit. She teaches pay-what-you-can workshops, writes the Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet., and hosts the forthcoming Melody or Witchcraft podcast that discusses the sources of literary inspiration. More at poetroar.com.