Sandra Doller: California Poets Part 7, Four Poems

Sandra Doller

July 1st, 2024

California Poets: Part VII

Sandra Doller

Four Poems

You can write about your kid but not your times. Mary Kelly. I can say she wakes up at night and says one funny word, one funny word every night, like salami or tic tac toe. I can say she puns but I can’t remember them. They said her father was a word attacker. The same kindergarten teacher whose legs he massaged. I can say calamity but not daily. Who is allowed to say say anymore. This is not a body I am not part of. It’s not that I wish I lived in Norway or no it’s not that I’m going to live in Norway it’s just that I wish I was born in Norway and I don’t understand what all these Norwegians are doing here they are just fine thanks. Who needs what we have. What do we have, Nestlé. There are so few thoughts that go around and I am penned in my macadamia nut trees and that is what lasts and what I can talk about. Although apparently trees die after a time, like they don’t just live forever which I had never considered.

My hand looked human, feminine human, not mine, from a picture or a film strip. I come up with answers like because the wolfy dog wears a bandana or because nuts are hiding or because you are magic. Or because your grandmamma didn’t have any, or because planes are very far away, or because we all share one letter in our names. Me and you and me and him but not you and him which proves I am central. I need proof. Poof. I need to cut my nails down quick and shave my eyes or eyebrows as they call them and I would like a different color for hair but I can’t decide, something that makes me happy but everyone else hates. I want something I can see but invisible to others. I am shocked on the radio when they still use light and dark / white and black to stand for good and bad, not even, beautiful and evil. Everybody does it. But me. Look at me. Being better. Than me. Proving my centrality. My light. Double poof.

My hand looked human, feminine human, not mine, from a picture or a film strip. I come up with answers like because the wolfy dog wears a bandana or because nuts are hiding or because you are magic. Or because your grandmamma didn’t have any, or because planes are very far away, or because we all share one letter in our names. Me and you and me and him but not you and him which proves I am central. I need proof. Poof. I need to cut my nails down quick and shave my eyes or eyebrows as they call them and I would like a different color for hair but I can’t decide, something that makes me happy but everyone else hates. I want something I can see but invisible to others. I am shocked on the radio when they still use light and dark / white and black to stand for good and bad, not even, beautiful and evil. Everybody does it. But me. Look at me. Being better. Than me. Proving my centrality. My light. Double poof.

The screaming barnacle reeled her in. She was misspelling things today and there was only one way to say it. Say sea. Say she was overloaded with overboarders. She leaned way over, too far for folks who don’t lean. Something grabbed her back and it was, as she said, that screaming barnacle. Not screaming in the audible sense. Just mouth wide. Open faced. Screaming in the sense of leaning into. Leaning so deep into as to go through. Leaning so far and deep into the throat of inaudible screaming as to become another mother on the other side. Isn’t this what tubes are for, she thought, petting her digs. No her dogs. Her three poodles Noam Chomsky, Leon Trotsky, and Jhumpa Lahiri. On deck. I asked for a film with a deck chair and a boat and all I got was this pirate ship. She thoughts. Thinking aboard is thinking again. I am not thinking about you thinking about me. I am. Her three petted poodles and a deck chair over there. Over the edge of the cliff of the boat which is to say the silken mahogany railing. She gets deep into the description of mahogany to herself. It’s a dark wood, a grandmotherly wood, the sign of a good home in a certain county of America in a certain century not this one. Can we pull these woods from that time into our own. Can we pull anything that is not burled. I have described the situation to myself for the rest of my life, she says, stalking down the silvered corridor stairs to the waiting audience whose backs are turned, looking ashore. We know enough about other times to make them again but not to make them make sense again. You know enough about me to recreate me on stage and screen but not page that’s a tip too far. Please do not approach me when I am writing to the corporation. She pulls out, now, a nub topped pen and one of those hamburger erasers so thick with the early set. Toddlers, she knows, eat them up. This is now my audience, anyone facing left. I will determine whether or not you are audient. I will say. And I will ship the hell out of the shape to get it. She circles a round with her shoe’s toe. A perfect oval no an egg in the deck. Almost a knothole. Some closed rotundity approaching the slender sphere. Are we talking a ship a the ocean or a ship a the stars. We’ve got oceans and oceans to burn. After we’ve exhausted everyone else. Push it out, into the middle, where you will a beached up poodle lay. If it wasn’t for the galley barnacle that snagged her she’d be gone.

Author Bio:

Sandra Doller is the author of several books of poetry and poetry-adjacent things. Her newest book, Not Now Now, is forthcoming from Rescue Press. Doller is the founder of 1913 a journal of forms/1913 Press, where she remains l'éditrice-in-chief, publishing poetry, poetics, prose and else by emerging and established writers. The recipient of various honors including the Paul Engle-James Michener Fellowship and the Anomalous Press Translation Prize, she lives in the USA—for now.