Zoë Christopher: California Poets Part 9, Four Poems

Zoë Christopher

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Zoë Christopher

Four Poems

Diane di Prima in the Garden

If it had been Diane di Prima

in the garden instead of Eve

she'd have refused the rib bit

to spring forth from the roots of

that tree instead. Let Adam

have all the apples. She'd have

none of his whining and pawing.

Adam and his ilk are entertaining,

she'd admit, but not much use

in a pinch. Diane could open her

own pickle jars like a goddamn

Marine. The boys break so easily,

she'd say, but they are amusing.

She'd have nothing to do with

original sin. That was God's mistake,

she'd say, not mine. He created man

with missing parts and now he wants

me to hold him all together. Well nope,

she'd say. Let him have all the apples.

Me and the snake are outta here. 

All Reckless Ain’t Bad

My father a Miles Davis Kind of Blue

a Bill Evans Waltz for Debby

his lyrical trip down the sidewalk

            his lanky saunter through the door

            his soft wit & earthy brilliance

            took a woman’s breath away.

To my mother, the intelligence in his fingers

            his Sappho and Neruda whispers       

            were the clenchers.

Early morning hours after gigs, he’d woo her awake

slip on a velvet glove at dawn

            to protect her from his damage

            both finally seeking slumber in a mutual haze.

But the loves of his life, his loyal mistress, was his music,

            his devoted partners booze & speed.

He couldn’t plug a leaky pipe, charge a dead battery, unclog

            a drain, but we knew if his piano awakened,

            there was nothing he couldn’t orchestrate into repair.

Three gin & tonics to the wind, the top down on the Alfa Romeo

            my sister and I perched on the back of our seats

                        oblivious to our lives in peril

            only that they were filled with his drunken love

                        and a joyful semblance of protection.

His laughter, from one staccato insight to an adagio climax  

            dissolved our teenage angst as we searched for the keys

            that might make him stay, our Chopsticks to his Kind of Blue.

When he died we heard Chet Baker’s sultry Funny Valentine

            as we scattered his ashes in Puget Sound

            a sudden gust of wind blowing him back into our mouths.

We swallowed hard and teared up, for a minute, but as we left,

            our lyrical trip down the sidewalk was our healing salve

On the occasion of my schizophrenic grandmother outsmarting

the Hooded Ones but not In time to save my mother

My Grams – platinum blond, skin-tight sweater 

under a leather jacket, wild and hollering 

from the back of a Harley, a banshee 

in the roaring wind, swigging bathtub gin 

from an old mason jar. She grew killer weed, 

danced to exhaustion out back of the Black Baptist 

Church, birthed my mother in a barn at sixteen.

But the Hooded Ones stole that child for ransom

finding an easy wound into Grandma’s susceptible soul

their tongues snarling, making her beat up 

little old ladies on the corner, tear apart a brick 

fireplace with her bloodied bare hands, 

French kiss the cops, bang on the bars, 

flirt with every doctor that positioned the 

electrodes that would fry her brain. 

I dreamed she swam to the Amazon for healing

held down on sacred soil as an acrid stench rose 

from the dismembering of her violated body. 

Small Brown women gathered her up, 

soaked her ravaged form in mineral salts,

cooled her flame with mullein and ginger  

infused her veins with light and embedded

one clear eye on every fingertip. 

They parted the veils to fill her belly with 

the wisdom of the Ancestors, and invoked

fierce courage into every vertebra.

Now go home, they directed. 

Heal your daughter. 

It was too late. My mother had already stabbed the

nurse, was already banging on the bars, flirting

with the doctors and begging to be set free.

Trigger Warning: We’re all fucked up.

Betrayed by the mother who carried you,

finally shot out of her womb at 60 mph, so get this: your precious

Abandonment Issues are not unique.

Struggled to get your footing, stumbling into & out of your teens, flailing at

the Big Pinata expecting treats. I get the joke. Your Inner Child grew up fast,

recognized early there’s no Normal to miss out on.

Always waiting to leave, then hesitating. Where do you go when you leave?

What’s left? Absorbed

into the Collective? Absorbed by the Great Mystery?

Or spit out into the cosmos like bad luck?

What becomes ash? What floats? What lands?

Did any of it matter?

Only as long as you are matter.

When you leave, matter leaves and a dense silence descends, the umbilical

tethering you to the Mothership is severed and it’s over. You’ve left, and as it

should be, it’s all in place. It’s all right.

Interview

December 23rd, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Zoë Christopher, Poet, Writer, Editor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Rumor has it that you published your first poem when you were 16. Is that true and if so, do you remember it much?

ZC: Ha ha! That was more than 50 years ago! I was sent off to a boarding school for a year, in the Swiss Alps, my parents hoping to keep me out of trouble long enough to get me to university. We had a lit magazine. All I remember was that it was a love poem that used my newly-discovered word, ‘sylph’ and somehow referred to a ‘poet’s concrete dream,’ whatever that meant! I do remember being thoroughly embarrassed, re-reading it decades later!

DG: You’ve held seemingly every type of job, from ice-cream truck driver, addictions counselor, to bookstore owner, to program officer for a radical women’s health nonprofit. In addition to this, you have a master’s degree in transpersonal psychology. What would you say taught you more about the world—those former jobs or the latter degree?

ZC: At 19, following a forced marriage and ultimate divorce, I was a single mom with no support and minimal education, so I did whatever I needed to do to make a home for the son I loved dearly. And I’ve always had a dangerous habit of saying “yes’ to most opportunities that come my way, and I think I just wanted to experience everything I could.  But more than anything, I wanted an education. When I was finally able to pursue undergrad and graduate degrees, I found a home in Jungian studies, and later in the work of Dr Stanislav and Christina Grof. My partner at the time and I built a retreat center, primarily to support people in recovery, and for people in psychospiritual crisis (it can look like psychosis but isn’t). In providing that one-on-one, 24/7 support, it gave me the opportunity to use everything I’d ever learned and experienced in my work and education. I worked in crisis intervention for about 25 years, and I feel honored to have been able to provide a refuge for people in crisis, and to have witnessed deep healing in many people I worked with.

DG: Your poems certainly pull no punches. When did you decide to write without any apologies?

ZC: It was never a conscious decision. In fact, it was my editor, Kurt Lipschutz, who pointed out that particular quality in my writing. I had to do a lot of personal work, over a long period of time, to heal early life wounds. Over the years, I used psychotherapy, the Native American sweat lodge, vision quests, entheogen work, Buddhist studies, soul retrieval, painting, Holotropic Breathwork (™), womens’ work – any healing modality I could find. I was just determined to not be a victim, to not let my past define me. I think that attitude was embedded in early childhood: I was barely a year old when I was put in a heavy, plaster cast that covered my body from armpits to mid-thigh, to immobilize my hip. For nearly two years I couldn’t walk. I think my mother was afraid people would somehow blame her, or pity me as a cripple, and she did everything she could to make me independent: she said my arms looked like they belonged to a baby bodybuilder, from pulling myself up to reach what I wanted, which was everything! To avoid carrying me, she’d let me scoot around on that cast like an overturned turtle!

For me, if a traumatic wounding is healed, it loses its emotional and psychological charge, and it just becomes a story. That’s when it’s easiest for me to write about it unapologetically.

DG: A big passion of yours is also photography. When did you get into that and do you have some recent or favorite images you’d like to share and perhaps talk about?

ZC: I’m an introvert, and at the same time, people fascinate me. I was given my first camera when I was 15, a little Brownie box camera. Then my best friend’s father taught us how to use the darkroom he built in the attic of their house, and I was hooked. For 10 years, following my move to San Francisco in 2004, I mentored for First Exposures, a fantastic photography program for at-risk and underserved youth. Those young people were some of the most compassionate, creative, and kind kids I’d ever know. They documented their lives, developed their own work in the darkroom, saw exhibits of their work in local galleries and museums, saw their images on billboards and in books. I came to believe that showing up every Saturday and creating work together was also helping to keep kids safe during their teen years that can be so hard. Those kids are now in their 30s, and I’m still in touch with several of them. I’m proud of the people they’ve become. And it was through our weekly excursions that I fell in love with street photography.

Being an introvert, I think the camera provides a way for me to be intimate with the world around me. And for a street photographer, San Francisco is an endless treasure!

DG: You’re currently working on a memoir. How is that going? Is the writing process easier or more difficult than you imagined?

ZC: Initially, I was just writing vignettes about our life for my son Ethan, to give him a better sense of our history. But a few years into it, I was devastated when he died. I felt everything all at once, and if it hadn’t been for a few close friends, and the anchor my editor provided, I’m not sure what would have become of me. And though the pain of that loss is far from ‘healed,’ my fearless and brilliant poet friend, K.R. Morrison, reminded me that writing about Ethan would be a step into meeting that sorrow head on. It was the hardest chapter for me.

But I gotta say: writing this memoir has been like living the crazy intensity of my life twice, and for some reason, I didn’t anticipate that! This process of reflection has provided revelations, regrets, remorse, hysterical laughter, jubilation, and many ‘Wait! What?’ moments. If I had known what I was getting into...I probably would have said ‘yes!’

DG: Are you a wait-for-the-inspiration kind of writer or do you not fear the risk of writing badly?

ZC: I have some phenomenal poet friends that I beg, “Please. Can’t you just write one lousy poem?” and it’s bloody intimidating, especially when we’re all writing from the same prompts at the same time. (Justin Cole Demeter and Jeffery Bryant, I’m lookin’ at you!) CNF comes to me fairly easily – my storytelling goes all the way back to being a little kid who made up stories in my head when I couldn’t sleep, and taking on different character roles so I could cue my mother, who was an actress, before she went to the studio. But I struggle with most of my poetry. Disconnected lines suddenly come to me sometimes, and I can build around them, but I’ll edit and revise a 6-line poem for days and still not be confident that it’s okay.

DG: How do you edit your work? Are there certain people you show it to or does it happen in isolation?

ZC: I keep a bulging folder of poetry and short prose labeled “For Revision.” When I return to it, sometimes I’ll just toss a piece in the trash, finding it hopeless. If that’s not the case, I’ll play around with it and finally send it to my editor. I also have a close friend who’s a voracious reader but not a writer. I’ll run all sorts of work through her. A couple years ago, I’d put together a small autobiographical manuscript of poetry and a few short stories, and we sent it out to 6 or 7 poet and non-writer friends for input. That took all the courage I had to pull that off, and their input was extremely valuable. But one publisher remarked, to my editor, “Why just this? I’d rather see a full-length memoir from her.” That’s when the trouble started! (jk)

DG: San Francisco is the city where you live and work. What do you love most about living/working there and what are the challenges?

ZC: San Francisco State University was my hope, when I applied at 17, but that dream was shattered. And since then, I’ve lived all over California. I finally settled here 22 years ago and it’s the first place I’ve felt at home. I don’t do well in the heat, and I love fog and rain, so the coastal climate is ideal. When I would take the bus to work every day downtown, it was only 5 miles but I’d hear 6 or 7 foreign languages between home and office. I love the diversity (ethnic, gender, age, cultural), and the passion and compassion obvious when I attend demonstrations and protests.

The challenges are mostly related to income inequality, a lack of mental health support, and funding cuts. And I have to avoid neighborhood social media: lots of complaining  about those issues and the failure of the system.

DG: If you could spend a whole day with any poet, who would you choose and why?

ZC: That’s a hard one. Probably Charles Simic. Some of his work is so haunting, and he’s such a solid storyteller. For me, each poem in The Voice at 3:00 A.M is a fleshed-out visual tale in so few words. I love his sense of humor, and the fact that he loves women. (I mean, who wouldn’t fall for him after reading “Crazy About Her Shrimp?”) And if I could share just one meal at the table with Tony Hoagland and Denis Johnson, I’d fall in love and then die a happy woman. Hoagland for his craft, Johnson for his earthy, poignant sorrow.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

ZC: Call me crazy but who or whatever manages my moods really has no control over them, and what I pick up to read is based on that bit of chaos. Right now I’m reading Patti Smith’s new Bread of Angels because I’m so drawn to her ethereal storytelling. And former San Francisco poet laureate, Alejandro Murguia’s autobiography, The Medicine of Memory, because his poetry sets me on fire. And The Collected Schizophrenias, essays by Esmé Weijun Wang who was diagnosed as such, because it’s a subject close to my heart. And Last Night in San Francisco, by my friend and investigative journalist Scott Lucas. I don’t normally read true crime, but Scott loves, and will passionately defend, this city and I’m inspired by well-crafted journalistic writing.

What I’m working on? The memoir is about ¾ of the way finished. And I’m trying to write good poetry. Hi ho!

Author Bio:

Zoë Christopher is a writer, astrologer, and street photographer. Over the years, she has identified as ice-cream truck driver, waitress, addictions counselor, art installer, bookstore owner, photography mentor, and program officer for a radical women’s health nonprofit. She holds a Masters degree in transpersonal psychology and spent many years working in crisis intervention. Some of her work has appeared in Zingara Poetry Review, great weather for MEDIA’s anthology Suitcase of Chrysanthemums, Shadowplay Journal, the 2023 New Generation Beats Anthology, Tangled Locks Journal, and Under the Gum Tree literary magazine. She’s currently completing a memoir.