Lisa Ortiz: California Poets Part 10, Four Poems

Lisa Ortiz

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Lisa Ortiz

Four Poems

Sticky Eye

It’s a condition some shepherd dogs get—

they  hustle just the one sheep. The herd

could run off a cliff.

I’ll lose you. I understand that’s part

of the deal. I’ve seen a dead deer in the woods,

bristled in maggots as if maggots were fur.

When you’re out of the house, I’m okay.

I make myself lunch. I listen to Gould.

I imagine your fingers on the flats of my teeth.

Sometimes at night, your lungs wheeze

and moan. I get up and look: the folds

and ridges, a milky pool in the trees.

I tell my eyes: don’t spare me, don’t pity.

I growl and I crouch—I want you so much.

Truth is, they lock those dogs up.

The Keepery

In the mind’s eye people say and by that they mean

a cavernous sphere inside the human skull.

I have an ammunition box full of oil paints.

Where is that box? In a cupboard in the old white barn.

By that I mean: in my mind.

I mean I think I remember where that ammunition box is

which is a real place but the reality of place and what

such reality might hold are made up in my mind.

After all, what is containment if not commitment?

What is memory but the murmuration of invasive birds?

I wonder sometimes if the paints inside that ammunition box

are still good enough to use.

I haven’t painted for years, but painting used to be my thing.

Google says that oil paints can last centuries.

It says ammunition boxes can last 50 years.

So the kept will outlast its keepery.

Example: my memory still serves though I’m wrinkled as hell.

Example: art is always present tense.

With those oil paints when I was young I painted angels.

I fashioned myself an artist.

By fashioned I mean I carried around an ammunition box

full of oil paints. I smoked unfiltered cigarettes

and wore men’s shoes. I painted my lips bright red.

As I said, painting was my thing. I painted angels.

On the angels I painted frightened expressions.

I painted terrified backwards-looking angels.

If somebody asked why I painted that way, I’d take a drag

of my cigarette, exhale a red-lipstick kiss. Eternity is frightened by us.

I’d say. Then I quit. Painting. Smoking. Explaining.

Then the question was: what to do with all those paintings.

I wasn’t the kind or artist who sold stuff.

I gave the paintings to friends. I sold some in garage sales.

By now those frightened angels are all painted over.

They’ve been cut or torn up, tractored into landfill.

Who I was. What I thought. Stuff I made.

The question became what to do with the paint.

I chose to keep it. And now maybe he ammunition box

is rusted-through but the paint inside is probably fine.

Toss the box out and put the paint in a bag.

Bury the box. Loss and ruin but built on

like Rome is built on its own former glory.

My life  built on the buried faces of terrified angels.

Barn. Mind. Box. Heavenly messengers

looking back, down, around.

All of us will die. We only imagine we won’t.

We suppose our skull will make a fine souvenir

its knavery and idiocrasies lost to time.

But, lo, its the oily insides that keep.

Scorched bone fragment, vessel of formaldehyde.

Oh, friend, be not the box. Be the aliveness inside.

House with the electricity cut. Barn with roof blown off.

A half-century-old ammunition box.

Pressed out tubes, red lipstick, men’s shoes.

I imagined. I made up. I held in the box of myself

all this time, this least little thing. Glance of an angel.

That old paint-peel barn, that one afternoon

such oppressive heat,  and our two chairs

pulled side by side in the shade.

The Quick

The human skull, removed of its vanities, resembles the earth's moon.

Fingernails bleed black when hammered or slammed.

Bruised skin yellows or midnights.

Resemblances prove a thing.

The moon and the word moon.

Human hearts and human fists

and the hit bursts vessels in the human eye.

Your fingers picked at the fruit’s pith.

My skin pricked with the fruit’s zest.

Fruit-round moon the O on our lips.

All this time

you barely changed.

You stayed right there—

splinter of night

in your teeth.

The Undercount

The counting

            done under us

like undertow

            but for the number set.

                                    Like we had it all

but subtracted—an elevator

the arrow light.

            There was a floor

                        then a vertical door.

Think volume.

Think mass

            and what languorous math, a sunk

            aquarium

             an undersea tide machine,

            full spectrum light—

 and it’s all rational.

            To count is

                        to matter, and I saw you

 on the street

            shouting new words

                        to old times.

Did you mean what you said?

                                                I thought.

            I thought

it might add up in the end.

Author Bio:

Lisa Allen Ortiz was born a long time ago in the wilds of Northern California. She’s the author of Stem, winner of the 2021 Idaho Prize chosen by Ilya Kaminsky and Guide to the Exhibit winner of the 2016 Perugia Press Prize and her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Bennington Review and Colorado Review and The Literary Review. She is co-translator with Sara Danielle Rivera of The Blinding Star, Selected Poems of Blanca Varela, which won the 2021 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation.