Watching Poets at Work
listening to Don Kingfisher’s workshop on YouTube
I listen to Don ask questions
To writers who explain music to be
Their inspiration, or dreams, that dark
Mine of unconscious riches. What pickax,
Should poets use to extract veins of silver,
What wheeled cart carries gold, they wonder,
Or only the golden hour will do, that instant
Before waking, or before the day’s end,
That disappears under horizontal horizons,
Balances the lucky world in a trapeze, stirs
The emotional soup of loving, and losing,
Genesis and the terminal moment we dread?
Elated, I read hope in the flamingo-colored sky
As clouds shift, birds attempt their last flight
Before darkness covers feathers, well-hidden
Seeds, the new partner they just wed for life,
At least flamingos do take their time courting,
Initiate dance steps in stilt legs, migrate across
Time, space, to escape my jam-packed mind.
I write distractedly, still listening to Don’s
Questions as poets undress themselves, a little,
Share techniques, dreams written on pages
Of the book sitting at their night table, which
Nobody uses because they either forget to dream,
Where the book lies, or the object of sleep soundly
In bed with partners who will never know why
Poets get out of a warm California King to rhapsodize
The moon, or capture the trembling beauty
Of the night inside the tea cup of perfection.
Alicia grew up in a bilingual family in Valencia, Spain. She learned English as an adult, began writing in English in 2017 and that same year won The San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Book Contest with her book Holding a Hummingbird. She has been a featured poet at numerous venues within the greater LA. Her work has been published in Colorado Boulevard, Lummox Anthologies, Altadena Poetry Review, ZZyZx Intersections, Panoplyzine, Rhyvers, and Spectrum Publications, among others. Her chapbook Out of the Womb of the Sea was recently published by Four Feathers Press. She’s a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee.
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