Margaret Ronda

HOW TO BE FAR

1.
When I was far away my father’s heart

2.
Took the wrong path

3.
Neat cut tender silhouette of blood

4.
So much shouting into icy southerly

5.
New words for remote:

6.
Dreamed of drowning, a small city submerged

7.
The peninsula’s cold shoulder, greenblack line fog-edged

8.
Out of earshot out of range down the stairs across seas

9.
His voice a humid gust

10.
Striding, striding tempest splayed over sea wall

11.
Learned sleepless learned yielding learned nothing

12.
Wrung out the century, spread out laundry in a hot patch

13.
New words for hardly knew, for who are you

14.
I slid my feet into oily tide, volcanic sand

15.
Sunrise carcass I dragged into the frigid bed

16.
Pink T-shirt blue T-shirt

17.
Three earthquakes, two I slept through

18.
At midnight the fish leap neon flares

19.
Where are you from how is your syntax forged

20.
I curled in a ball, wave-stunned

21.
Held on rigid eyes armorless clasp

22.
Ferocious crimson bloom on cotton

23.
Ordinary tide, oil rig

24.
Earthless ruptured my inscape 

25.
Then Venus slipped out of sight

26.
The hours, the hours, erratic, jeweled, survivable

27.
Ghosts of my old earth, stop pressuring me

28.
Bore me seaward over miles to cast my net

29.
Surge of unblinking anger over email

30.
Read: Why fly my thoughts abroad

31.
Did it remember does it communicate in hungry feverish waves

32.
Sliced straight through to bone

33.
By instinct I was renewed and hit refresh

34.
Dreamed of that smoky light, my sweet dead one 

35.
Left the call, watched a pink blood moon

36.
Hey silence hello, cavern, eerie crystals

37.
Watched a juicy worm hunch through the gutter’s gray rain

38.
Dear friend, your beautiful delphinium face

39.
Child’s tentative voice father’s can’t hear you

40.
Rat nestled in the compost bin among orange rinds

41.
Strawberry jam on a square of bread, a kiss

42.
She said on FaceTime, you are a breathing animal

43.
All my life gathered in little colorful squares

44.
He was like me still

45.
A great effort to stay warm

46.
Gravity wind and water

47.
If I surfaced where the ocean turned itself over

48.
Crumpled again and smoothed

49.
What holds the heart open anyway

50.
How to be a ragged claw a glistening shell

MARGARET RONDA is the author of the poetry collections, For Hunger (Saturnalia, 2018) and Personification (2010), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, VOLT, and West Branch. She is also the author of the critical study Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford, 2018). She teaches American poetry and environmental literature and theory at the University of California-Davis.