April 2025 | poetry
The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of
brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy
tied to winter need. Instinct buried deep,
that sunshine and sustenance will soon grow
scarce? But there’s comforting memory as
well: heat from the fireplace blaze, a wet but
soothing thaw after sledding outside for hours.
Childhood leaves its imprints, remote and often
faded, only to swell at incongruous moments
like now, here in the late afternoon warmth, as
hundreds of seagulls circle above this lagoon,
white specks in the distance shimmering with
light against the western face of Tamalpais,
from the Miwok támal pájis, “coast mountain,”
an approximate translation they say. I was once
a mountain girl, but not this kind; no ocean
near, frozen ground for months, and snow swirling
as white shapes in wind like these gulls I could
write, if I wanted simile today but I don’t. I just
want these gulls as gulls, rising and circling,
circling and soaring, and I want the pull of
the tide in and then out . . . waves of ache tangled
with rapture; this poem a rough decoding of
the fugitive sway.
Virginia Barrett
Virginia Barrett is a poet, writer, artist, editor, and educator. She earned her MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco, where she was the poetry editor for Switchback. Her six books of poetry include Between Looking and Crossing Haight—San Francisco poems. She is also the editor of four poetry anthologies, including RED: a Hue Are You anthology.
April 2025 | poetry
House and Universe
The single-story house’s flat roof would have been a wondersoaked site to lie and study clearsky starscape, but I remember flatness without below, without above.
And I remember, rather than imagine, how bruiseblue regimen of the old, lost house trapped us within, but memory occludes the dateless daydreams Julie and I lived in defiance of a realm where words portray amniotic vastness as nature’s hostile overflows, where the trailer is a fortress against the enemy’s attack when snowstorm unleashes its bestiary of windrage and menace.
And after such a snowstorm, wakedreams defy bruiseblue sleepdreams, defy the baretoothed violence within original house, where fondness for blueprint, plumbline, and spirit level’s bubble traffics in handshake regimens, where the magnetism between earthrooted home and skyclad world is unreal—
defy fistclench threat to weather’s together and animal pleasure in sanctuary.
And after such a snowstorm, real cropfield borders Northgate Estates, and further off, Deertrails beneath a skeletal forest canopy.
Silence is the orchestra of vastness. Snowtufts crash down from branches of Paper Birch and Balsam Fir. Footsteps thunder through milky surface of snow.
The sonority of silence, when snowfall blankets landscape in acoustic intimacy of armchair tucked into a corner.
Inside the skeletal forest beyond the cropfield, the crumbling shack would be hearthfire’s sanctuary.
More than original house in a realm of planes, envisioned home will dare to conjure universe.
Julie sees the toppled chimney alive with lorestitched duty when forest cottage shouldered into winter stormgusts at nightfall.
Clapboards and roofshingles merged with fractal surround of weather and forest, sheltered the merchant from his worry about the westfacing window that sutured inside and outside. He was expounding how to profit, what to do to get what you want from life, expounding the actuarial warmth of risks that sell well, while the snapping fireplace shyly melted the underlayer of snow that covered the forest cottage and windfingers smoothed the rooftop’s colding winter stuff into an icy cocoon.
Hope’s dormant rootstock of Sharpshinned Hawk’s nest anchored to cottage chimney, Coyote pawprints in snow, the chrysalis within transcends the regimen of blueprint, plumbline, and spirit level’s bubble.
The creature inside his cottage cocoon lost his habit of handshake logics, lumbered free to wander beyond planescapes, to wander below, wander above, and found himself endowed with a taste for nectar.
As seedcoat, cocoon, and clapboard cottage are inner sanctums of cotyledon, chrysalis, hearthcrackle, Julie and I lived our daydreams of home when winter snowplush blindingbrightly blankets cropfields and silence is the orchestra of vastness.
And winter-ready animals, we plunge into snowdeep and dig through the strange bright soil with our hands. More than danger of frostbite we feel the freedom to dream without regime. We claw a tunnel network beneath snowdrifts.
On all fours we crawl from one lair whose walls and ceiling we firm round with mittened paws to another lair we shaped from the inside. In our bright cave shelter from colder winds, we huddle in warmth created from fistclench, baretoothed givens.
I should like my house today to be as warm as our childhood sanctuaries of snow.
And lonely work, no profit, no blueprint, plumbline, nor spirit level’s bubble, to restore a faucet handle’s luster, to liberate the sutra of woodgrain from a coat of ash, to clear cobwebs from corner that augurs room that augurs home that augurs the silence of vastness, amniotic below, amniotic above, cotyledon, chrysalis, hearthcrackle sheltered within their sanctuaries.
The Dialectics of Outside and Inside
Thresholds write our memoirs, the doorways we cross,
the doorways we close, and all the doors we pass
without conviction. Someone in charge conscripts
doorkeepers who believe the them they exclude
is not coextensive with the sooth of us.
When windowpane adjudicates the edge
of outdoor and indoor, the unstinting space of Moonlight’s
halo enlarges the inward of lamplight soothe.
October via Largo Argentina,
with its Temple to Feronia and feline
sanctuary, I mutted around the streets
of Rome. En route to Piazza dell’Orologio,
I strayed past Pasquino and scavenged his adjectives.
Lunacy should be at home in poetry,
but few admit their Saturday morning nonsense,
sister and brother together building tents
with blankets spread among the living room furniture,
they daydream renunciation beneath Moon’s light
alongside sibling Birch and Balsam Fir.
I found myself caught in crossfire between Pasquino
and Censor Marforio, two talking statues of Rome.
Marforio twitters, moonshine is just a ploy
to famish craving to tame. The places from which
we are gated help us be the us we are.
Pasquino answers, music’s largo movement
melts geometry’s artificial membrane
between a circle’s inner and polyglot outer.
Marforio twitters, margins close the purebred
in and shut the mongrel out. Pasquino
answers, mongrel blood is multiply pedigreed.
Moonshine scandalizes stingy geometries.
The wilderness of retreat within oneself,
feral chamber inside chamber inside,
boundaryless within of spira mirabilis,
refutes Marforio’s artificial paradise,
the origin myth of inside and outside, partitions,
and other lazy certainties. The reach
of unstinting outside is coextensive with one’s
own inside. I knelt in narrow spaces
below Witch Hazel and Sumac, narrow spaces
amid Eryngium and Echinops. The more inwardly
I mutted, the further music’s largo wandered.
Marforio’s functionaries refused to stamp
a crane’s foot upon my diploma because I noticed
how the Mezzaluna garden’s honeyvoice
coursed through outermost branches of beinghere,
flowed through the stairwell’s silence from cellar to attic,
the forest’s silence after snowfall, the silence
that amplifies Panicum’s whisper and the press
of feline paws on ancient Roman rubble.
Wonderless horse’s mane emits no flame.
Marforio’s henchman only validate
the facts that shall toggle yes or toggle no.
In binary notation, lawful coordinates
may register unit one or unit zero.
Wonderless time is no longer just a Yewtree.
Rather than conform to henchman protocols,
blueprint, plumbline, spirit level’s bubble,
rather than toggle yes or toggle no,
when readers voice a poet’s exaggerations
as their own unforeseeable creations, they
enlarge the poem’s more than real halo.
James Bradley Wells
James Bradley Wells has published one poetry collection, Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and one poetry chapbook, The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Main Street Rag, New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals. Wells has written two poetry translations, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and HoneyVoiced: A Translation of Pindar’s Songs for Athletes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
