Lisa Coffman: California Poets Part 10, Three Poems

Lisa Coffman

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Lisa Coffman

Three Poems

The Easterner Succumbs

Fantastic springtime! If spring came here

it would burgeon like this, acacia rumor

invading the windows, mockingbird that trills

and trills and trills it’s mine I’m youryouryour

sweetheart. If you want. Season’s sweeee-saw

sweetsour. If you want. To breathe is to gulp the hour

reversed, back into its rainbow film, to float away

with all this hidden inside, rise. Loose the mare

who carried you, galloping, all the way here. Loose

her to the lawn’s white noon, the erasure

blade by riotous blade. Prolong the kiss, even the merchant

kiss until it confesses, in arias, the four

directions it traveled to parse its small flower,

darling, against your lips. Seed rising in you wild as rumor.

Don’t Eat What Won’t Satisfy

i

Home. Eye sharpens to volcanic cones the hills

are, or were, an arc of seven leading to the sea.

Beyond these and their valley, greater hills

have flanks and paws, the oaks green-black for summer,

the veldt grass gold. In his emergency jacket

placid alongside traffic, Ron Dexter picks up trash

and plastic before it reaches Turri Creek or blows

into the bay. The Adopt-a-Highway sign

nearby reads, simply, “EMPATHY.”

Farther on, for the fourth time only in my life,

a long-tailed weasel! The striped form streamers

by the road, white cheek patch flashing

but the body flipped, stiffened. At my driveway

neighbor Ireland, barelegged in her summer dress,

says see what I found? then gravely

makes a gift of it: a heads-up penny in her grimed hand.

ii

I take the dog down the hidden bay path the farthest

we’ve gone since I heard about the mountain lion.

The crashing that comes becomes a big dog running

(we’ll never hear the lion)

pocket-comb lean, hackles up along his spine.

Notes us, crashes on, the freckled woman running after

calling I’m sorry! He’s good dog! He is.

She says they come here every morning

that they can, at sunrise. The mountain lion?

“I carry pepper spray and a knife,” she says.

“I like to think I have the grit to fight one off.”

But she’s laughing at herself. Her name—I ask—

is Anna Grace. Two names. Her house a yellow

school bus, top of the hill, 11th street.

                                    Should I find myself ever

jumped, ambushed, failing in the terse dark of close

combat, I will throw back my head and cry out ANNA GRACE

Bike ride 2/2, there were also eagles

            with help from Adam Zagajewski’s “Dutch Painters”

Not a pewter hue in sight, the California sun

plumping its advertisement of light.

Sky’s flat billboards of blue, clouds like faint irony,

drought not yet edging the quilted December green.

The house at 3789 saves its downfall for later.

Though the paling fence lies down on the walk

and cracks rising through the stucco gape the roof.

The moon stalls overhead. Roses bloom voluptuously,

lonely as love letters, while the ink of blinds

guards the abandoned windows. Love or money,

starch or morals—something failed here.

Last to go will be the surface, after depths give up all vigil

and the cellar forfeits its small mystery.

Small mystery. Why do we find the house hospitable,

talking idly by our leaned bikes, dreaming one day of staying?

Author Bio:

Lisa Coffman has written feature stories for NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC World News, Oxford American, Daily Yonder, Philadelphia Inquirer and others. She’s the author of two books of poetry: Likely, which won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and Less Obvious Gods, with poems featured in Verse Daily, Writer’s Almanac, and numerous anthologies. She’s been grateful to receive fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.