the trailer and bringing it home
stark is the bare grass
the white from yellow
grass
above lake baryessa and the son’s friend
in the stark blue fast
car
coming into the house at
a distance
and staying
at a distance
stark is the blue blue
sky
without cloud the largest made lake
in california
stark is the
divorce. the division
of property. stark are the fields of off white grass
this side of the lake and
that
stark is the trailer
cover blown off
before we hitch four
wheels to six wheels
stark is the mouse that
escaped miles down the road
and you saw its eyes bug
and its fur oily from nesting in the generator
when it sped to the
concrete parking lot of the outlet plaza
so far from the field in
which all this rested for
almost two years
stark are the miles of
highway
pounding rolling falling
away under all six tires and now four more
stark is never seeing you
before
this
The wick of my day has burned through.
Dipping sun on long grass gold,
and a few birds here and there.
People walking, walking dogs,
the dress-weather of early
summer.
I left the table full of people
I’ve known
for decades. Left conversations
of different foods
and how the foods were made, and where the foods
can be eaten and who eats the food and doesn’t eat the food and who makes the
drinks and he doesn’t drink the drinks
and that one person who drank
all the drinks
and then ended up in a van. All
the conversations
and this road is gray
and the light is going
and where yellow lights flash
there’s no one on the crosswalk except
a rustling musicality of the all that
flows
peripherally ~
the sky makes us into her bed
after Kimi Sugioka
the sky is making us into her bed
of tangerine sorbet cherry almost night and dawn
the shape of broad predator wings feather by feather. above one
who says this breath only makes me know all there is to lose
and the staggering I feel from that, that I can't protect him
from the all of that. And the woman stutters between bed and chair
and wants to have all the numbers line up like they did
like they did when she prepared taxes over forty years before this
this falling and this anger at not holding
onto thoughts that seem for a moment so true, true as a rock
and then she throws voice like a rock right at me when I stand close
just because I stand close, and because it's all collapsing
for her
the sky makes us into her bed
of stories
sometimes it is simply the foot of anxiety off my throat that brings this joy
the wildflowers and wind in foxtails were perfect
i carried the words down the hillside, repeating them and changing
them as i walk
through eucalyptus and around the turn that opens bronze to the
city.
by the old palm tree that feels like home and like fireworks.
a wind whistles up as sun sets.
some
talk about the rain tomorrow morning.
and still there is a rise and set and rise
of it all so
close
once the roof has become open rafters and the sky opens to rain.
memory wanders over the solid planks that hold warm water
and the rain patter(n)s above
wetting insulation
weeding toward walls and cracked plaster ceilings
the world is strewn and littered like a redwood forest the trees and branches fallen (over the/a) creek after wind
Mudita
Depending on the
time of year, I
would have been
around eight,
maybe nine. It was
about two years after we moved
from Berkeley to
Toronto. I remember sitting
in the finished
basement of the house we rented that second year, trying
to clear my mind.
I remember the visual of lifting
through air of the
room, the floors, through the kitchen
where my mum was
standing
doing things with
her hands,
and up through the
attic
and further up.
And it scared me
and I stopped.
And I'm not sure
where I had got the idea to do that in the first place.
Anne F. Walker [photo credit: Misha Bruk] completed doctoral work in American Urban
Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, after beginning her poetry
career in Toronto. The Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Creates, the
Ontario Arts Council, and bpNichol Memorial Foundation honored her work with
numerous grants. UC Berkeley twice awarded her poetry its Eisner Prize. Her
sixth book of poetry, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length, was shortlisted
for the Sexton Poetry Prize as a manuscript, and published in 2025 (The Black
Spring Press Group / Eyewear Publishing). Walker lives in the San Francisco Bay
Area, teaching writing at San José State University.
