Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of All the While, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Her recent work has appeared in venues including The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and Canary and has been selected for Verse Daily. She teaches English at Porterville College, where her students keep her awake and astonished.---------
South of Cayucos
I want to be that sheen
at low tide where the creek
meets the sea.
You wouldn’t know
the place unless
you knew that creek,
unless you’d been there
other tides, higher ones,
seen the flow cut
deep, the sandy banks
collapse again and again.
I want to be that shining skin
at lowest tide, sweet, salt,
moment of vanishing.
Polaris
Bees work the vetch, moths tryst
in the jasmine, and on it turns, the world
replenished like a well
in blues and greens and wings while leaves
like needles, minnows, hosts, hands
conjure oxygen.
Near the center of each nasturtium leaf
a north star. Here the heavens
pivot, certain engines catch.
January Villanelle
The holidays are over. Now we’re here
surveying candle stubs and bits of ribbon.
Perhaps this stillness is a new career.
The kids had risen early, packed their gear,
made their farewells and then away they’d driven.
The holidays are over. We’re still here
after waving from the porch as from a pier
at little crafts on course for the horizon.
Perhaps this stillness is a new career.
Time’s origami has its way with fear,
with loss, bright things gone dark and plans gone riven.
The holidays are over. We’re left here,
our failures folded into something dear
and strange and new, for which we haven’t striven.
This stillness may become a new career.
Old age is coming, but it’s not yet near.
These early afterhours are their own heaven.
A certain party’s over; now we’re here.
Today this stillness is a new career.