Peter Kline: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Peter Kline

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Peter Kline

Five Poems

Pandemic Feature: Survivor

Someone arranged to put us here together.  Father, we call him,

though we understand this is a metaphor, like Big Sister or

Score Keeper or any other.  He judges us with hidden eyes. Each day he sends ingenious miseries so we can please him 

with the vigor of our struggling.  Our privacies are his: he

oversees our sleep, and renders secret changes to our bodies,

which may take years to realize.  Some think he can even see

the color of our conscience, and remember the dreams we

forget.  These and more he cuts together into books of one

great story, each with a hero and a devil and a moral.

So these other watchers must be angels.  Look at their rapt

contentment, the play of light on their faces.  See how much

they care for the lives of others. 

Pandemic Feature: Superhero

What made him different made him dangerous: he was

immune to doubt.  So he became brave and reckless, a zealot

in Infidel City, wandering like a child through the brothel

alleys, parting the market crowds like a pennant blade.  A kind

of modern paladin, he intercepted each villain between inkling

and trigger-pull, always just in time to sever the finger.  Then

he was gone while the would-be victims still stood weeping. 

And of course there was a cost, there were many costs, and he

made no friends, and no one knew him.  But least onerous of

these was the need for disguise, as who these days could be in

public without one?  (Who these days or ever?)  The mask was

black, bespoke, a second head with a white hook-beak.  He

wore it like a spike protein at Carnival.

Pandemic Feature: Neverland

You can’t seek out that other world.  It won’t be found by

snaking rabbit holes or barging into wardrobes.  Likewise

taking your little dog for a walk down Tornado Alley, or

threading shoals at full sail on a starless night while the

captain’s stoned––these are obvious attempts at pandering to

fate, and fate is a permanent loner.  Catch a plane to Xanadu:

the pleasure dome will smell like Disneyland.  Climb straight

up Blue Sky Mountain, and you’ll gaze from the pinnacle with

the same two eyes that guided you.  But look, late again,

hurrying back to work, full of an overpriced lunch and the

stocks’ new highs, you cut through the random crush and

fevered waiting behind the station.  You leap from the middle

streetcar stair and land in a place of testing.

Pandemic Feature: Conan the Barbarian

There’s no freedom like an orphan’s.  No mother or father to

steer you into the safety of mediocrity, corrupt your body by

forcing obedience to the king’s science, or bury you under their

loaded history.  No magic mirror into the future in an old

man’s stammer.  Nothing to predict your specific form of

inevitable suffering.  To light the pit of who you are and what

might be, there’s only the glint of ideas piled with the personal

effects, and the sparkle of unreal memories.  The killing edge

of the greatsword, and the pommel jewel.  Rivulets of blood in

a pool of ale.  Firelight on a fingernail, and the demon’s slinky

silver collar.  Almost laughable, I know, from this side (till

some cataclysm makes all our screens go dark).  But with such

scènes à faire is the fantasy of any life composed.

Pandemic Feature: Horror

Don’t worry.  It’s okay.  It will be okay.  It will change.  It will

be.  Let go of your fear.  Let go.  Don’t give it away to the

monster.  Don’t give it away to your lover, your teacher, your

child.  Give it to me.  It’s hard, it’s getting harder, yes, it’s bad,

it’s getting much much worse.  It’s almost unbearable.  Some

of us are giving in. Some of us can’t stand to see what’s coming

after what comes after, even though the ending is a timeworn

certainty.  The pupils fuzz, the fists relax, the jawline softens. 

The lever slips, the seals decay, the door drifts open.  The

power’s been cut––no one can see the other side.  But don’t

look for hope to come charging through: those flickers in the

dark are winking knives.  Hope, like terror, is the empty door. 

Here, sit close to me and hold my hand.  Let’s watch it

together.

Author Bio:

Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Hemingway House, Amy Clampitt House, and James Merrill House, and has won the Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and The Columbia Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon.  He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University, and can be found online at www.peterklinepoetry.com.