The following poems published in the California Quarterly, Vo. 51 have been nominated by the editors for the 2025 Pushcart Prize this year. The nominations had to be sent by December 1, and we did not have the fourth issue of the CQ ready yet, so there are two poems nominated per issue of the other three issues. Our only complaint is that there are too many great poems to choose from!
Vol. 51, No. 1: The Girl Who Talked to the Moon by Christine Candland
Vol. 51, No. 1: The Nature of Opened Doors by John Schneider
Vol. 51, No. 2: In Quarantine I, II, III by Christina Pugh
Vol. 51, No. 2: A Wet Velocity by Jade Lascelles
Vol. 51, No. 3: When the Prophet Comes Home by Livingston Rossmoor
Vol. 51, No. 3: Stream of Consciousness by Carolyn Jabs
Congratulations!
CQ Editors – Maja Trochimczyk (Managing Editor), Bory Thach, Nicholas Skaldetvind, and Konrad Tademar Wilk
California State Poetry Society Board of Directors - President – Maja Trochimczyk, Vice President/Communications – Richard Modiano, Vice President/Membership – Richard M. Deets, Secretary – Ambika Talwar, Treasurer – John Forrest Harrell, Monthly Contest Chair – Alice Pero
In the Sea of Rains the sun blows scarlet,
sunset
after sunset while
scattered
opal light leads right out of
the
basin.
I’ll
pitch a tent, stakes in the ground.
Make
sure it’s level. Listen to wind chimes
breathless,
singing alpha notes like pleasing wine.
When I
move to the Sea of Rains, I’ll dance every night.
My feet
will touch bottom only sometimes in between
partners,
shadows on the wall, of sorts.
A
rhumba, then waltz. Mendelssohn’s Hebrides
will
echo throughout the halls.
When I
live in the Sea of Rains, I’ll wear gossamer
over
trails of silk and harmony; shimmy down
cavern
walls with unexpected ease; as icy droplets
crest
in a crystal vase carefully placed.
I’ll
find him in the Crater of Hypnotic Dreams.
He’ll
be searching for titanium, gold or even me.
Suppose
he doesn’t like me. What will I do then?
Pythagoras
will move next door. We’ll take a2+b2=c2
apart,
figure
out how it works. Calder will build mobiles that sway
on
kinetic currents. We’ll ride gondolas perched in the sky;
fly
from peak to peak, as stars settle around us,
wondering
who we are.
Christine Candland
Los Angeles, California
THE NATURE OF OPENED DOORS
Never mind that dust keeps rising
before us like ancestral ghosts
or that there’s never been a true bridge
between
living and dead.
Never mind how all melodies eventually
find their
native silence
and names tremble free of their stones
despite the
bodies still resting below.
Never mind the muted wind chimes
of their
voices, how hard we still find it
to hear without listening. No longer contained
behind a
rusted closet door at the far
end of an unlit hallway, every keepsake
that’s kept
us from forgiveness
and being forgiven. Let’s dust off all these old
melodies,
the weightlessness of their silences,
reunite names with their bodies, learn the contours
of this unlikely bridge, that’s
always been here.
Berkeley, California
IN
QUARANTINE I
I live
among the branches of an oak.
My home
is a labyrinth that ends
inside
this room: blue walls, white bed;
on the
wall, a blue artichoke
and
three arches reaching toward
a
paradise beyond the frame, one arch chic
dismantling
itself in a processional.
I don’t
believe in an afterlife, but while
I’m
here, I want to believe in the ideal.
IN
QUARANTINE II
Epaulement
means shouldering,
in
ballet lexicon—a verb that doesn’t
quite
exist in English. Like this crabbed
compulsive
shoulder to the web: a spider
thrusting
long silk far from its focal point--
a
sermon, O my soul. I sense its
rhythm
pause
and twirl as syncopated
diligence:
this labyrinth will widen
by the
time we wake tomorrow.
IN
QUARANTINE III
Putting
points together, like a proof or a galaxy:
you
bicycled far beyond the city limits
to look
for the kissed, compounded Star of David--
two
planets colluding in a brightness intricate
as
needlepoint or harmony. In the clouds,
you saw
nothing but clouds. Yet the night
had
been magical, you told me later.
Something
more than vision had spoken.
Christina Pugh
Evanston, Illinois
A
WET VELOCITY
right now, at this very moment, vibrations from the quivering muscles inside of me,
in the vulnerable and intimate tunnel that is my throat, are forming waves. waves
that are cresting and building momentum, foaming at their own natal agitation,
forming a tide’s pull in search of land. and by land, I mean the masses that are other
beings in this room with me. and these waves crash and break onto the calm beaches
inside of them and the sands of their edges filter my restless waves into something
comprehensible. and the salinity of the sound that somehow equates to what I want to
say is mixing with the quartz and glass fragments that somehow equate to their wanting
to hear it. and together, in this exchange, we are enacting the staggering power of
water’s dance with a gravitational pull that takes up most of this planet. and just as
we will never see all of the ocean’s surface area, nor will we ever hear many words
spoken aloud to us. so what we’re doing here is becoming aware, if only for a few
minutes, of the undercurrent running beneath the resonance of these letters shapeshifting
from internal to external and then internal again, but in a different location. we are
collaborating in alchemical ways, and it is oceanic and it is magic and we should all
be aghast that we are capable of being here, together, fluid and destructive and
immense as salt water. our voices as unpredictable as a tide receding out and then
rushing back in again.
Jade Lascelles
Denver, Colorado
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Perched on a rock mid-stream
I wonder when the past became
a deeper pool than the future.
So easy to get lost in the murk
of river weeds and memory:
people tethered to their history
only by photos of days
that weren’t typical if only
because someone took pictures;
places rearranged by someone else
oblivious to the one curtained
window
open to a breeze that soothed
the fever of a summer night;
stories that blur the boundary
between imagination and reality
because I can’t be certain who
was there and, even if I knew,
they aren’t reliable
witnesses.
I turn toward the other pool
so shallow I can see each stone,
etched by eons of experience.
Tiny fish play hide-and-seek
with the shadows. Twigs, launched
by someone upstream,
run aground here.
A leaf floats on its back
savoring what’s left of the day.
Carolyn
Jabs
Santa
Barbara, California
WHEN
THE PROPHET COMES HOME
The world is a humongous whale,
drifting through an ocean of galaxies.
We are all small fish.
That is bona fide.
The truth never comes out.
Was it a spontaneous outburst?
The way a star is born
after gas condensed, compacted and exploded.
Or an act to initiate a new plot,
like every movie vying for Oscars.
The verdict requires an oracle.
A breeze to comfort, strengthen
the remaining conviction,
and whisper to us:
“When you are tired,
come to the pond.
We will see what fish see
in the muddy water,
and find out
why they are lured by bait,
and how they confront the hook.“
Then with a lower voice:
“Even though no one is waiting for you,
wait till the water is clear.
You will see them all.”
Livingston
Rossmoor
Modesto,
California
