3 poems
SANTA ANA WINDS PREPARE FOR FIRE
We will go first, on tiptoe, when the sun
isn’t looking. We’ll wear last year’s wings.
We’ll go first, while they’re sleeping. The birds
will know what to do. If they are busy
dreaming, we will gust them awake
and they will escape.
But not yet.
We will let go all of our mouths and
sing open the windows. The trees
that are tired, they will
come down. Dead leaves
in the hallways, all the water
gone missing. It will work. See: we remember
everything that was born and died and what
came before. We have learned how
to haunt, but you are young and angry.
Let us go first. We will send the deer
running, away from the dryland.
The coyotes will know us.
They will howl. We are
the beginning and the end and
in the morning
the people will stand
on their porches, wretched
and feverish, limbs frantic,
scanning the sky,
waiting for you.
Now burn.
BEFORE I FOUND CALIFORNIA,
I found glass in the river, the kind
that grows on trees and falls
in Springtime and this is how I knew
something was wrong: it was blue
and blue and Blue was
the cassette I kept in the tape player,
caressed and choking
with vines. I was trying
to remember the way
back. I planted
wood slats in the water
to grow myself
a house and it was
useless, everything stayed
riptide and blue and I tried
every way to come home
to California. I sewed poison oak
through my eyes, to see
if I could see better. I stopped
wearing shoes. I picked scraps
of light up off the floor. I traded
my hair for gold. I built
a burning in my hands and it hurt and
this is how I learned I could only love myself
on fire, a wind chime dance
of howling, wild brush
fire in my feet. I danced until
I crumpled into ash, until I forgot
I had ever been lost. I found
California and I’m telling you
it was just like the real thing.
THE RISING
Something is bleeding I think because all the maple leaves
are pooling red, in the cracks of the streets and over each
of the children’s chalk drawings. There is a new ghost, or maybe I just
haven’t been paying attention. At night, on the side of the highway I
can see her coming from the east. A gray billowing thing, hands
spreading over the bay, over the dying and the not. I hold the sky
in place with my fingers, pinch it in the corner, and let the rest flicker
in the wind. Maybe it’s true that heaven sometimes looks like
San Francisco. The sky holds its breath and the rain sinks
into the dirt, the caress (or carcass) of a prayer. Up here, I can tell
that something big is hiding from the world. When I walk down the road,
I know I don’t exist and I drink so much light I am soundless, unremembered
wind, hoof prints. I leave words in the redwoods, I walk barefoot
through deer tracks, I am something bleeding, I see
every soul rising, I –
Livia Blum (she/her) is a student, poet, and activist originally from Los Angeles, California. She is passionate about the power of storytelling as resistance, particularly the relationship between writing and environmental justice. She is the recipient of the Emogene Mahony Memorial Prize (2020) and most recently, the Ruth Forbes Eliot Poetry Prize for her poem “Santa Ana Winds Prepare for Fire” (2021) at Smith College. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, and the New York Times Metropolitan Diary.