Terry Wolverton: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Terry Wolverton

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Terry Wolverton

Five Poems

GLACIER

When you call me from the ocean

it’s as if we live on different continents.

Turbulent sea is far away

from this island of concrete commerce.

I turn off my headlights so as not to blind you.

Turbulence can be found in the living room, the pantry.

Waving goodbye can be misread as drowning.

It’s too far to shore and even that is crumbling;

eddies swallow more and more of you.

Better to drift for the rest of our days,

waving goodbye to certainty, ambition.

Ocean is clogged with plastic, so goodbye to that too.

Does the wind call me up? Does it dial

a number long abandoned where I used to live?

Please include your callback number;

otherwise, I may never see you again.

Memories we might have made will be blown

to dust, scattered, irretrievable.

I shed cells and memory with every breath.

I can’t even remember that I don’t

recall you now. Who was that person?

Someone on a different continent,

calling me at a payphone on a glacier

slowly melting into the turbulent sea.

SPIN

Because the rotation of the planet is speeding up

I grow tired of explaining myself.

Every night gets shorter. I hunger for sleep,

but the clock is relentless, commands me to rise.

I am dizzy on my feet, trying to adjust to the whirling world.

I believed the fire was totally out, but later my spouse

raced to the kitchen in her work uniform. What’s burning?

She waved at the smoke rising from the pan.

Everything seems to spiral more recklessly.

Calendar pages fall to linoleum like leaves.

Tomorrow will be here in a minute, and in two minutes, the day after.

Most of the stories I’ve forgotten; they’ve churned

into the galaxy and I can’t catch them.

I don’t run as fast as I once did.

I’m slowing as everything gets faster.

If I were to time travel, I wouldn’t journey backward

to correct my blunders. I’d hurtle forward, despite

forebodings of the future, speed to my appointed

rendezvous with reawakening. We start at zero,

garbed as Fool, wind up dancing atop the flaming World.

LUCKY PENNY

I sleep with a penny in my belly button

so my chakras won’t absorb the crazy

energy, everything so hot right now,

burning to the touch, the mind no longer

an oasis but jammed with glowing coals.

Sun dimmed behind clouds of ash, dull penny

hanging heavy on the horizon. Still,

there’s some kind of dawn, so time to get up

and face the music, the chime of coins clinking.

I turn over; the penny rolls under the bed.

A school photo: me scowling in a red plaid dress,

braids; I used to howl when grandma combed my hair.

Do ghosts return to try on their clothes in other

people’s closets? Seers warn against shopping

in thrift stores, say that dresses carry spirits.

New penny in my pocket. One hand holds an apple.

The other grips a gun. Apple round and alive;

the gun could put an end to that. Bullet

embedded in our kitchen cabinet. No coin

could protect me from the crazy energy.

A penny is no longer made of copper,

just a thin veneer over zinc. One red cent

flames in my umbilicus, the whole body erupts,

sparks dream of a girl in a red plaid dress, her ghost

shopping in the four corners of the universe.

UNSTRUNG

What happens to a sentence when syllables

are lost? Sometimes it’s just dryer lint

stuffed into ears, muffled, nonsensical.

Endless strings of words attached to tongue,

I yank and tug until I marvel how

my body could contain that much rough cord.

Have words lost meaning? Am I reduced to

guttural grunts, inscrutable timbres?

First sound is the hum of the universe,

gravitational waves whisper in dreams,

the echoing drum of black holes. The sun

radiates, moon emits a song of cool.

I’ve been droning to the sky so long,

I can’t promise I’ll ever move again.

Muscles may jerk but also shudder,

collapse like a rag doll without stuffing.

Phonetics jump, blur, my nervous system

rewired, a sudden need to shuck my skin.

Though I sleep most of the time, I dream, a

kind of waking. Knit me a net to capture

dreams that shake me from a sense of safety.

Suitcases stuffed with dreams, carelessly packed;

dreams broken, discarded, luggage now light.

I can’t believe in safety anymore.

Where have they taken me? By day five,

I can no longer remember day one.

Gravity loosens its grip, nothing to hold.

Not another being in sight, no known

destination. Will a door swing open,

a veiled pathway reveal itself to me?

I know the darkened city is in trouble.

Trash uncollected at the curb and all

my secrets fester. Vandals strip lampposts

for their copper wire. It winds around my

limbs like scratchy twine, strings of words like

Christmas lights that, deprived of spark, wink out.

SO MUCH ONCOMING

If you’re in the city, it’s probably already too late.

Sip chemicals from the tap,

gaze into muted sky.

Sing yourself to sleep with sirens

that ricochet through the night.

You could still drive but you’d rather not.

Lights so bright, so much oncoming

rushing at you. Dodge all that space junk—

landfill in the sky. You’re armored, bunkered,

homesick for a view of stars.

Sometimes you find things in your hair,

leaves and bits of twig, lost coins,

cats’ claws, your mother’s locket,

signals from doom broadcasts.

What are you meant to know? No one can predict.

They promise the alchemy includes you,

so, hop into the cauldron, let

chemicals corrode your skin,

flash and sizzle, sear. Exhale

purple smoke, color of sunset before it vanishes.

Author Bio:

Terry Wolverton is author of thirteen books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including Embers, a novel in poems, Insurgent Muse: art and life at the Woman’s Building, a memoir, and her most recent novel, Season of Eclipse. She has also edited sixteen literary compilations. Terry has received a COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, a Publishing Triangle award for nonfiction, and a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council, among other honors. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, and Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. http://terrywolverton.com