2025 Banyan Review Poetry Prize Winner

~ Los Angeles, after the January 7th fires

 

Funny to think how new I felt coming out of class that day,

Flush from the ballet rigors, sweating down the sidewalk—

A manzanita in bloom ready to begin again. I looked to the sky,

To the speaking gull passing, and beyond her an alien 

Billowing mouth of dun and charcoal signs. I am remembering 

This while fumbling to clasp a bronze bracelet given to me 

After because everything was lost, of course, the ungrace

Of this catastrophic state I lean into, searching the singed box

Found in the smoking ruins, sifting for recipes, for favorites 

Of ancestors where conversation flows more freely with 

The dead. All that I dream, more familiar since flames 

Leveled our former life, the taste of newfound nothingness

Rendered sharper by bones, sinew, and cherry port—it rocks me 

Gently, this bracing tonic poured over the lot. We visited it 

Last night. I watched you walk across like an astronaut sinking

Six feet into ashen muck. I’m walking on the roof! you cried,

Disappearing into morbid glitter, into satin aftermath—moonglow 

Sifted over every beautiful thing, a lunar reduction. It looks like 

Sunlit snow, said Buzz Aldrin when he first touched boot soles 

To it. Your pupils close down, he said. Like layers 

Of our lives contracting, we forget what has been, the record 

Of the earth. I thought Sometimes the sky’s too bright, then 

Everything upside down turns black. How can the moon be shining 

If we are standing on it? I asked you, my underworld husband,

My confection. Let’s concentrate on where we are now—

Our cake of ambient people falling through rooms, through years 

Collapsed to one luminous moment. I see you in the house, 

There in our antique bed, your head between my legs 

In the drowsy hours, our children chasing the dog, 

Laughing at cartoons wrapped in Saturday morning 

And blankets woven by aunties. Now I’m stirring 

A kettle of Coq au Vin in my best blue overalls. 

The hair at our temples glints of spare gray. Now 

I’m watching you pull a cake from the oven, 

The steaming gold dome of sherry and nutmeg batter—

It sweetens the rafters worn bare by love and rage. 

In the end we found our magnificent desolation 

And a way to see the stars through wars, 

Through family demons and orbiting fires 

The world performs around us on a horizon clearly 

Curving away like a smile in an unknown language.

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