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By Mira Susa

An unexpected present

fell into my lap

at an age mature enough

crossing the ocean and the great land

to receive it

I am now here with you

My California my California

tossing away my prejudices

about sun-tanned musculous bodies

and smiles like masks

behind which - who knows who lives -

I am now here with you

My California

to revere the big trees the cataracts

the ancient perished people

the wild waves the rocks

eaten away little by little

the sunshine and the fog

that comes from the ocean

lika a mother's hand

extended to comfort so gently

to take away the fears

of being lost in this big country

or rather being lost in multitudes of primodial faces

surrounding an oficial appearance

polished in decades behind

to a near-perfection

of a success-in-the-west-by-eastern-european-girl

who - although not catholic nor disident

adored Czeslaw Milosz

and his poems about the Bay

full of fog that is growing and invading all of us

all of us so similar and so unequal

in my California

My California dreaming

The dreams of ih-so many

immigrants like me

SILICON VALLEY SOLSTICE

By Tim Peek

We live in the time of no time.

Time requires a past

And this speeding arrow is ever forward

Sprung from no hunter’s bow

but launching itself anew infinitum.

We create the future.

One line at a time

Our story told by powerpoint

We have no history.

It’s all blue sky and possibility.

And yet,

the sun traces its arc in the sky

settling into solstice.

We are suspended for a moment

between light and dark and don’t even know it.

Another deal.

Another version of the future.

Payment not for work done

but for riches to come.

Turning finally from the monitor

does anyone notice

Saturn and Jupiter conjoined?

Not this close since 1226

The arc of history bends to this

and who cares.

History has limited us and now we are limitless.

And still, the fearful heart,

the angry fist

the sad eyes

of the forgotten human

live on

Cloaked in the hoodie

fingering the cursor

launching the drones

of today’s timeless drama.

Seen only by those who live both

the past and the future

Feeling the hand of history

Reach through them to draw the now.

Santa Cruz

By Ruth Mota

Santa Cruz was childhood birthdays at the boardwalk where the merry-go-round spit out metal rings I tossed into the red-lipped clown. The tilt-a-whirl spun and the rollercoaster climbed clickety-clack in a rickety rise over wooden bones before its pelican dive, sudden and swift, heaving stomach to throat, swirling our screams to gulls in flight. There, hands aloft, we succumbed.

Arm in arm, we walked along West Cliff Drive. Draped in Monarchs, the eucalyptus fluttered its tiny orange flames. Sea lions barked at the surfers gliding in towards the lighthouse. Dogs barked at the waves gliding out with their sticks while we hunted beneath sandstone bridges for fallen purple stars and giant green mouths of anemones sucking up the tide’s catered lunch, as the tingle of our salt-flavored kisses rippled like foam down the length of our spines.

Dark green are the mountains that lure us now into a circle of redwoods, whose spears slice through the summer fog whose branches radiate golden spokes like the fingers of God. Listen to the tap-tap of woodpeckers building condominiums in their porous bark to house acorns stolen from nearby tanoak. Look between their roots at the crimson boletes that glisten like toenail polish or the dancing chanterelles who lift their ruffled skirts to waft apricot perfume over an abandoned grinding stone of a kitchen stolen from Ohlone.

Rising from the bellybutton of our town the chiming clock slices time, as the sea slices beaches, and in the shadows a lover’s statue, sculpted from surrendered guns, blesses tables spread with food, not bombs. Our bookshop, where the sellers really read its treasures, outlives conglomerate invasions. Our libraries spill with poetry and art, and offer shelter from the rain for those who carry cardboard signs of ‘hungry’ even as our fields spread like aprons weighted down with apples, sprouts and berries and strong workers come to fill our farmer’s markets to keep us fed as we succumb.

A Coastal California Town

By Heather Griffith

Beautiful beach

town, university

students of life.

Expanding minds

Poets gather at the local library

Alongside the man smelling ripe

For a nap

To be out of the rain

All inhabitants with books

Battling demons inside.

Outside

Police commissioner kneels with BLM

Middle school students protest in the streets

Wildfires turn the atmosphere to smoke

Strawberries picked under noon blackened skies.

Soon the Salinas River

In Steinbeckian style

Floods the lives of the most vulnerable.

Sordid beauty of the Central Coast

A young boy jumps from a tan toned van

To pee on a westside succulent lawn plant

Child exposed to the world too bare

Living under threat of an overhead storm

Steel spun cotton about to unleash rain

Ocean throws boulders at millionaire beachfront homes.

The shark and sea lion weather the wild bay

Tangled lives in the kelp forest

It all comes in waves.

HOME SPACE’S LANDSCAPE IN A STRING OF IMAGES
A WEEK AFTER THE CZU LIGHTENING COMPLEX FIRE

By Joan Donato

Everywhere dust of ash.

Redwood trees with black bark

within a week of fire

sprout easy green.

Tarweed’s tall stem reaches a foot

to one dime size yellow blossom.

Raspberry leaves kiss the Earth

soften its grey in verdant clusters-

anxious to extend their length to brambles.

Raven’s welcome kraa call,

harsh and excited.

A wild redwood rose three inches

in beginning.

California Sister flutters in smelly air.

Soot tattoos when tree bark is touched-

Earth calling back life.

Everyone Loves California

By Annika Chadha

busy streets and beaches are all in california. warm, cold, sunny, rainy blossoms and buds animals and nature creeks that run streams that stride bees that buzz what a wonderful place for all living things but in the town it is busy for all things that hurry people who need to work crowded streets and stores but i am proud to say i love california!!!

Panther Beach

By Taylor Gorman

This sweater still smells like you, still feels like you fit inside it. You left it in my back seat, folded like a small blue god that for years I have neglected to pray to. Where have you gone, where am I going? Two different questions. We’d known each other for a week, and I'd had the sweater for a small decade—you took it from the trunk unapologetically, telling me you could never remember how cold the coast of this state can be at night. These jagged beaches, the darkness that the waves come from. Keep it, I said, but it draped over you like a sleeping ghost while we climbed down the shore. We took our shoes off and stepped into the sand and rocks like it didn’t hurt, didn't mean a thing, until it wasn't sunset anymore. The sky still looked like an eye cut open, like the light wasn’t coming back. We sat there listening to the water, and you asked about my secrets, so I gave them to you. I said the problem was that I'm embarrassed of my anger, the problem is I forgive. I want to hold on to it, to disassemble and understand it, place it, feel it correctly. I just can't. And you said you didn't know the right words, but it was as if you felt too much, that every word breaks your fucking heart, that you wouldn't trade it for anything else, even though it strings you up and pulls you inside out. Unintentional, I swear, that I touched my foot to your foot and said sorry. I'm sorry. Not understand me, understand how much I feel, too, want me, please want me, please break me open and feel me, make me feel something, not anything else. Just I’m sorry. It hurt more than I'd expected to admit. I wanted to ask about your fears and your future. Tell me anything. Tell me that they involve this sweater, tell me how I can’t abandon it now that it needs me, now that it has come back to me entirely wanted and new. And we sat there, trying to find out what else there was to say or understand about each other. What was there left to know. You pulled the blue sleeves over your hands. I said that I'm comfortable with silence. You nodded. Later, on the drive home, you asked if I meant it.

Pacific Tidal Changes

By Robin Lysne

Sitting away from the lighthouse

on Twin Lakes Beach

huge cement stones stand

around the end of the harbor.

They look like jacks

we used to play with as kids.

I hear the thunderous waves

but can’t see them from this distance,

except when a vertical splash

rises above the stones

halfway up the lighthouse.

No matter how the stones or waves are,

birds fly all around the light house.

Clouds are high

like vapor steam.

Many birds come up in flocks

seagulls, black birds, cormorants,

then a Blue Heron passes by.

Down a bit on Monterey Bay,

Capitola beach is gone

after winter storms.

Sand is piled near a deck nearby

Zelda’s porch that was washed away

last year. Today you can sit by the ocean

and enjoy the waves and

Soquel River Creek has thrashed out

so much sand with high tides from rainstorms,

Every day the pacific beaches

change moment by

moment.

Staying in Santa Cruz: Buteo linaetus elegans

By Andrew Fague 

The long sea-migrant highway,
Baja to the arctic Beaufort Sea,
that unfathomable bustle of the Pacific,
that deep motive of life

fades like a memory here, where the Earth
wades in, sungazes as tall mudstone cliffs,
stands unraveled, evolved, rusting
into shapes of wind and tide,

an afterlife already here,

Indian Paintbrush streaking and singeing,
dead wild radish stalks dancing over seedlings,
Pampas grasses waving white plumes, sun-
bleached, tired of a California colonial parade.

If I can still move after this life,
I will weave a nest of broken sticks,
line it with shredded-soft bark, offer thanks,
nestle in some fresh leaves, and reside

as a red-shouldered hawk, an elegans,

my feathers the dusty color of creek roads,
my chest a pale chinquapin chestnut,
distant crop rows tilled, dried,
spread from brow to nape

over aromatic, eucalyptus thoughts,
superior, abysmal eyes.
The elaborate mistakes of this expensive human
life will be engraved underwing, evident

as I fly. When I rise

I’m headed for the woodlands, a furtive body
sustained on rodents, snakes, frogs, maybe
a worm or a parakeet, a regimen of tricksters,
thieves, death-eaters, water-acolytes, tourists…

There, above the obsolete railroad, a willow
twists a misshapen new branch into the open.
With my wrinkled yellow talons I’ll keep grip.
With an elegance of spirit I’ll endure,

lilting in varying breezes.

Highway 9: an Understory

By Echo Guernsey

Long before Highway 9, in an age before automobiles,
before the empires of now had risen,
before those kingdoms further back had built their palaces on cliffs above the sea,
before religion or philosophy or the first violin,
before we knew how to count the stars,
before our tails were lost and we left the trees to walk upright,
the redwoods stood—primeval giants, tree trunks of Jurassic hope,
and the story keepers of our earth.

Up high, in their crowns, they remember the overstories—
back to when their branches still shaded dinosaurs,
Apatosaurus lifting his long neck up gently to dine on dark leafy greens.
They keep the sound of vanished footfalls,
of wooly mammoth and saber-teethed big cats,
remembering, too, how their redwood ancestors once wrapped
around the northern hemisphere, before the earth froze over in an age of ice,
forcing retreat into those rare corners where the frost could not reach.

In their tallest canopy, redwoods keep the overstories of a sky full of constellations,
of Ursus both major and minor, of asteroids and the deep vastness of the cosmos—
of the rarity of life in a universe otherwise void.
By nightfall, under a celestial blanket, two bald eagle lovers huddle in the top branches,
in their nest, built years ago, to which they return season after season,
their wingspan less than an empire, their feathered necks shorter than Apatosaurus,
but still the redwoods hold the weight of their bodies, the sharp cry of their whistles,
knowing it matters that we all find our way home with the spring.

Down below, in the shade of saplings and ferns, huckleberry and Sitka spruce,
in this grove that gathers us now, the redwoods keep the understories—
of banana slugs, earth’s slowest creature, contracting time across the needles,
of wandering salamanders who live out their lives along a single redwood trunk,
skydiving from the over to under stories in search of meals and hollows and beauty,
of two humans speaking vows of devotion under the dappled light of an April midafternoon—
of the fall of Rome and the fall into your lover’s trembling arms,
the redwoods remember all stories just the same.

Long after Highway 9, in an age beyond automobiles,
after the empires of now have faded into darkness,
after palaces of long-ago kingdoms have crumbled back into the sea,
after religion and philosophy and the last violin,
after we have counted that final star,
after our tails have grown back and we return to the trees to pick wild berries on all fours,
the redwoods will keep the stories—of the footfalls of wooly mammoth,
of the patient grace of the banana slug,
and of two lovers, who despite the vastness, found their way home to each other with the spring—
miracles of devotion, rendering our universe all the less void.

In Santa Cruz, Neighborhoods Sprout Along Once-Upon Driveways

By Hannah Tool 

I water corn and zucchini overflowing their raised bed
whisper little good mornings to their prickles and stiff necks
as the trash truck gently backs and beeps its way to the foot of our dead end street
slowly, kindly,
gracious even to the brusque black BMW
who elbows through and gruffs its tires along the curb
its driver a scowl begrudging the collectors’ deft maneuvers
its engine growls, tires rubber squeaks
that shoot down the remainder of the outlet and roar off onto the main road

the family across the street - mother, father, not-quite-yet teen daughter
whose coop clucks into the daylit din -
sigh relief through breakfast curtains
as the roughness rupturing a slow morning’s waking sounds
- fowle squawks and municipal murmurs -
dissipates into the receding sea fog

when the chickens quiet I wonder whether it is only because
enough of their work is done to settle into a Wednesday’s breaking dawn

that afternoon I wonder, too, what the street’s end neighbor thinks
as he cozies his clean red truck into its spot at the end of our walkway
and performs his work’s-end ritual: gather cooler, mask, hardhat
from the truck’s cab, take all his given minutes strolling into golden hour
down the short stretch of street to home

did he hear you mumbling on the edge of the yard, where you crouched and studied
a burst milkweed mess,
questioned dry stems and snipped judiciously
around butterfly eggs, scrounging what had gone to seed?
did he notice me looking on from the sun spot on the steps,
brow furrowed in the afternoon gleam and
nose atwitch at the sharp smell of sliced stems wafting up the walk from your workstation?

or was he perhaps as we were, rapt and mind blind to everything but a summer moment last year
his daughter leaping down from the passenger side of that little truck’s cab
soccer-cleat kicking the bumper affectionately,
her cheeks aglow from a well fought win, his too.

all that wonder glows with the yawning afternoon sun
and I hear bright clangs and chimes of laughter through an open window next door
it's Kate preparing dinner for her wife
while the crows caw in waves, hummingbirds cackle at our too brown salvia,
and you sweep the sidewalk smooth.

In Search of Gold

By Penelope Eklof

I’ve often said I moved

to California to learn to hug.

It was only half done in my family.

Not until I watched my Jewish

and Italian friends did I know.

I watched how they did it.

Full-bodied, open hearted,

bravely placing all emotions

on the line as if this might be

the last time they ever saw each other.

When I arrived in Santa Cruz,

hugs were waiting everywhere.

I made notes in the diary

of my hungry heart.

Some were big

and bosomy, others

like flopping

into a warm down quilt.

Some nourished like a bowl

of steamy stew, and others

a promise of safety, even if

just for that one moment.

Hugging is a yes kind of thing,

an I’ve got you kind of thing,

a here’s what I can tell you

without cumbersome words

kind of thing.

This is the best gift I can give you.

Let me wrap it in my arms.