Andrena Zawinski

Andrena Zawinski lives and teaches writing in Oakland, CA and
was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Among her publications
include work that has appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast,
Slipstream, Rattle, Many Mountains Moving, The Progressive Magazine
and many others. Her full collection of poems, Traveling in Reflected Light,
was released in 1995 by Pig Iron Press as a Kenneth Patchen competition
winner. Her chapbook, Greatest Hits 1991-2001, is part of Pudding
House's archival and invitational Series. An online chapbook,
Elegies for My Mother, is at The Pittsburgh Quarterly. She has
a chapbook and dvd of poems, music, and photographs forthcoming.
Zawinski has been Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com since 2000.

THE PICKERS
“Stronger and stronger, the sunlight glues
The afternoon to its objects…”
from Against the American Grain, Charles Wright

The pickers, backbent and dozens abreast, rise before the sun
past the blonde grasses, behind the concertina wire
running between Soledad and Salinas, move in squats,
toss artichokes from sun-pocked fields into pickup cabs,
calloused fingers pricked by the thorny thistles.

They pour seeds into rivulets of dry earth
that will burst into lettuce, chard, the great bouquets
of broccoli and cabbage along El Camino Real’s humpback hills
where foremen watch, arms folded across their dusty boredom
and the long light of days stretching inside another summer.

Bodies at work, long after limbs tire, long after chests heave
beneath bird-bone beads, abalone shells, scapulars dangling
from red strings, or even chains of gold glinting off the sun,
faces muffled in scarves and hoods, sweat scenting the air,
backbent and dozens abreast, birthing a history of earth.

And so they move, the pickers, silhouetted against the horizon,
westerly winds crossing groves and vineyards farther north,
farther south, they move, follow the crops, follow the seasons,
Steinbeck’s ghost among the harvest gypsies in the fields,
pen in one hand, pail in the other, working towards some end.

As sure as low clouds cool the day down, the bodies turn
toward evening, lay down the ache of the field in the stretch of legs,
slope of shoulders, move toward dreams of the unburned, pain-free,
unafraid, unspent paper in the pocket for some half-hold on a home
on the road, birds skittering tree branches at sunset,
pecking at the unpicked.

AFTER
I make cries like a bird; I give out sounds of grief like a dove.
--Isaiah 38:14

after
the cranky caw of the backyard crow,
after geese bellow their offbeat evening refrains,
after thieving herons squawk and beat wings nest side,
after night turns into a still life, city side, lake side,
its clutch of gray clouds lying low in the long summer
on its last breath, night nuzzling into the grassy hills,
perfect lick of light still at the water’s edge,
after descending into a rocky, watery sleep,
on the low drone of a cajun fiddle on the radio,
the smell of ash in the air in another fire season,
after this,

there is a woman
screaming in the night,
her garbled tongue spilling onto the stage of the street,
backlit by the steady flash of police car lights,
the shrill of her dampened only by sirens on the scene,
and then the slam of the cruiser’s door,
and then the key turning over its ignition,
and then the hum of the motor, then the sudden quiet,
the street finally at rest beneath a halo of misty lamplight,
after

a woman screaming, screaming
like the cat on the fence screeching in heat,
like a fist to a face or a rape, like a war zone,
like a womb ruptured in child birth,
or a mourner’s yowl graveside, or some harpy,
or the baby next door waking for its four a.m. feeding,
the neighbor’s shepherd barking at the muffled wail
under the milky light of the cracked half-plate moon,
late train in the distance pressing past the square
into the blurry shadows toward some comfort ahead
as I stay on, straightjacketed into insomniac silence

after
a woman screaming in the night
and around whose dark absence
I throw my arms.

MORNING NEWS

This morning, the heron huddled into himself,
head buried deep inside the ruffled tuft,
long bill aimed at bracken edging the bog,
thin plume arched up in victory, having had his fill
of a new clutch of downy-backed ducks.

A tern picked open a stingray at low tide
at sunset, swatch of shoreline awash in blood,
and I watched the red of it, redder
than fishers’ rock cod off trawlers at Pillar Point,

merciless gulls a scramble of screeches
for castaway scraps. And just down the shore
a seal pup beached, face slit mouth to cheek,
hook bleeding the sand, flies a frenzy in its face.

This morning, life seems quite hopeless. Just listen
to the early news, how it uproots silence, sends it
wild as wing beats thrashing into the wind,
chipped by words, by the fact that
nature can be such a terrible beast.

TAKING THE ROAD WHERE IT LEADS

The city is banging around again inside my head,
skyline a glare of lights in a blare of amped-up speakers.
And the news is so noisy--there is a war going on
somewhere, over there, this time in Fallujah,
bodies hung like charred rag dolls above the Euphrates.
And that is why I am speeding onto the freeway ramp,
and turning all my thoughts to you:

Let’s take the road where it leads
out to the blonde grasses and wind bent cyprus,
gulls a blur in blossoms of gossamer clouds,
egrets padding along ice flowers at water’s edge,
lighthouse steady in its quiet coastal warning,
everything bowing down to an order of things.

Let’s make promises, as if we can keep them,
string them like beads into a necklace windswept
by sunset, as shadows grow long and light cuts short.
Let’s reach up, see if we can touch that sky so close,
or spark a wildfire on a lightning burst,
or on a wind shift kick up a storm,
or like some comet, let’s really light up this sky.

WHAT WE LEARN
“...as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.
As a woman, my country is the whole world...”--Virginia Woolf

Under the bottle brush tree
the lovers sit, circled in each other’s
arms, all alone right in front of us all
on our walks around the city lake,
their kisses blind to the afternoon
breathing down on them and us.

I think of my own first love,
how a woman can learn not to take
but to give, how not to gain a self
but to lose one inside another--
natural as breathing, to be in exile
under her own skin, colonized
without knowing she was occupied.

Long ago, women in my family carried
bundles of wash on their backs
down to the creek bed to scrub it clean,
later balanced books on their heads
for good posture and the possibility
of a cover shot on a fashion magazine,
having been fed a diet of Cinderella,
Sleeping Beauty, the Snow White tales.

Just look at the statistics--how many
of us have sported the split lips,
bruised eyes, broken limbs,
how many assaulted and betrayed,
how many isolated and afraid,
our homes gone up in flames
from so many hearts on fire.

We have resisted and rebelled,
conquered enemies, negotiated peace.
We have also had our feet bound,
bodies girdled and gagged, some buried
beneath layers of cloth. We have been
overthrown, dispossessed, imprisoned,
enslaved, burned wholesale at the stake.

We have been venerated and feared
as Congolese leading warriors into battle
with shields and spears, as Mongolians
riding steeds armed with bows and arrows,
as Seneca ruling the land and the clan,
drumming and healing, as Balkans singing
in the company of women, just for the song.

Some of us now build muscles in our legs
and take to running for the thrill of the race,
work them in our arms wielding swords
and wrestling whatever might confront us.
We grow strong enough to carry ourselves
to a shade tree, rest beside the fairy dusters
in the kiss of our own breath, learn to love
first ourselves, deeply, and with great abandon

SOME LINKS for more poetry by Andrena Zawinski:

ADIRONDACK REVIEW
http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/zawinski.html

DISQUIETING MUSES
http://www.disquietingmuses.com/May00/zawinski1.html

FOR POETRY
http://www.tcsn.net/jackie/januaryfeb_2006.htm

IN POSSE REVIEW
http://www.webdelsol.com/InPosse/zawinskipoetry9.htm

MAG
http://www.muse-apprentice-guild.com/winter_2006/poetry/
andrena_zawinski.html

MANY MOUNTAINS MOVING http://www.mmminc.org/mmm_online/texts/
poetry_pages/zawinski_woman.htm

MESART
http://www.mesart.com/poems.html

NOVEMBER 3rd CLUB
http://www.november3rdclub.com/01-06/poetry/reading.htm

ON THE PAGE
http://www.onthepage.org/outsiders/the_mother_with_claws.htm

PEBBLE LAKE REVIEW
http://www.pebblelakereview.com/Zawinski.htm

POETS AGAINST THE WAR
http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/displaypoem.asp?
AuthorID=58#453059684

QUILL AND PARCHMENT
http://archives.quillandparchment.com/Authors/Authors.html

RAINTIGER, sampler of works
http://www.raintiger.com/archives

RHODE ISLAND MAGAZINE
http://riroads.com/poetry/factory_poem.htm

TATOO HIGHWAY
http://www.tattoohighway.org/10

THUNDER SANDWICH
http://www.thundersandwich.com/ts16/zawinski.html

TRIPLOPIA NOISE issue
http://www.triplopia.org/inside.cfm/ct/45