Selected Poems

Margaret Ronda

Volume Three, Issue One, “Atmospheres of Violence,” Poetry

 

War sonnet

The fires never ended

ragged cough in throat

downward settling earth

ash silica lead downdraft

drank in the sunless future

at strawberry field’s edge

sleeping faces barely open like a flower

the pink ashy sky grew sick, sicker

 a dirty war wind lifted high

there’s warmth in the soil like life

it’s the hydraulic mining blasts

the valley air inferno

the almond orchards for miles

fever bloodstream skin

 

Lullaby

extend your right hand

don’t breathe in

the day overtaken by

a seamless trample

you won’t be fed

down by the factory door

the song lapsed low

she was still pinned beneath

he was a disappearance

in wayward air

along the frontage road

the notes rotting away

small boy held in foreign arms

shouted into brisk wind

borrowed clothes fit loosely

a tisket a tasket

in the shape of a bird

paper flowers or head in hands

no accidents of sunlight

you won’t be hungry

little dying song

a dollar in your pocket

in a midnight in the Panhandle

a border a sob a war story

the sun’s scathing eye

near hard barriers

border police with wraparound shades

a plastic bag with “effects”

a nursery rhyme about the north

ten tent cities in the flatlands

children march in a circle

leaves and shit the gutter

 

Dear friend,

I was thinking about a study that examined a series of shapes. Human musculature, sexual positions, the layout of an internment camp. How is structure different from form. Form is a man’s selfies in a thousand window displays and shards of sidewalk glass, a hundred sliced smiles. A border is a structure. Some days my eyes hurt from waking. A sound, faraway thunderstorm, pounding blood. Sometimes I was writing; sometimes I stared out windows. Sometimes there were tree shadows on white blinds or roses etched on a lampshade. I followed the patterns with my eyes, but all I saw were prisons. If you take everything out of the day there’s still a spine to it, a shape like a broken rib. I was copying down others’ words. How’s a thing held? Then I was thinking about a letter to you that would contain every shape, everything closed and open.

 
 

Fire History

 

When did you first see it

Do you remember where you were

 

Smoke blankets sky

The sun is faint, brown-red, an imaginary warmth

         

Subtle, mesmerizing

Beginning with a dim premonition

The breast, ears hot, skin flushes

Was the earth younger in those days

Were you alone or with others 

Did you learn to build it, tend it

Shape a nest from moss, twigs, dried leaves

 

We were in the kitchen and the day went out

The fables passed down: a woman whose dress

Caught fire and who burned strange

The man who slung fire from his hands

A child who wept tears of flame

  

Some days a warning low under the breath

Little stars of ash blanket the windshield

Wonder if it will hop the freeway

 

The old earth burned then too

But less brightly

A living thing, tender breath

Carrying new combustible life

When the scorched wind picked up, changed course

 Did you feel afraid

We read the fire book out loud

A smile on a god’s face, a seed

Time suspended when the first spark struck

Did you expel it from your mind

Does it react, grow fiercer

Do you douse the embers at night

After it dies, each fire has a story

We drove along the burned-out ridge two years later

Orange light on charred black trunks

 Green shoots, California poppies in bunches

Did you store it try to keep it alive

It’s a kind of dry windy heat

It’s a flame to leap over for good fortune

It’s the scald mark on your wrist

It’s the charred hills outside Winters

Jack pine seeds cracked loose to scatter

Wood-boring insects, rosy paintbrush

Some plants love to burn

Some fires love a steep hillside of brush

The animals know when to run

 
 

Paradise

Poem Layout
down where the wildflowers grow
a tendril of fire
tiny yellow petals
 
 
Poem Layout
what set you alight
volcanic red suburbia
town with “a future”
sun smoke-faint
goldminers burn & ransack
to “open up”
excavate
drill in
what set you alight
pine canopy
dense grassfields
spark-struck
lightning-spined
abstract and blazing
a galaxy or a cat’s cradle
horizon cloud laden
Poem Layout
like sky in reverse
a stroked wind heaves up
Poem Layout
condos carparks
supermarkets swingsets
sleepers a woman in pajamas hosing the perimeter
dogs a caged parrot
sun done for
school buses trailer homes
/
all along that clothes line
sheets aflame
flimsy roofs
molten
one long road down the mountain
wooden houses wooden fences
Poem Layout
drag along, black wind
holler in the terror plumes
lake’s edge a red simmer
little ash snags
on an eyelash
Poem Layout
how does fire express itself
on the downslope
in sultry wind
with tongues of chamise
a bed of cinders
small patient things
in defiant shadow / illuminated
in charred
scrub brush or unlit woods
life spun
wildly still

 ❃❃❃

Margaret Ronda is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at UC-Davis. She joined the UC-Davis faculty in 2014 after teaching in the Department of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. Her critical book, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Post*45 Series, Stanford University Press, 2018), attends to the ways American poets and poems dramatize an ever-clearer sense of planetary environmental crisis by reimagining poetic genres such as pastoral and elegy. Her essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar won the William Riley Parker Prize from the MLA for the "outstanding essay" in PMLA in 2013. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, The Brown Foundation, and the Hellman Fellows Fund. She is the author of two books of poetry, Personification (2010) and For Hunger (2018), both published by Saturnalia Books. She serves as an associate editor for Contemporary Literature.