Even before the horrible fires of January 2025, my poems were threaded with ribbons of fire, hints of disaster. I go back and read them, and there are wildfires, stray sparks, matches struck, smoldering angels, and lanterns carried into the mountains. There are relics pulled from ash. I worry about California’s future a lot, and so my poems are obsessed with its fate. In a poem, fire is lit by language’s imagining; it breathes destruction and creation in equal parts. It takes everything down to the beginning. •
The movement between two ways.
Either up the mountain or
Down, the light different here,
More nuanced or plain
When it blends into the fog and stops
A building from being seen.
Cornhill street, isn’t it?
I didn’t see my father fall in the market,
Though I spotted the scab on his shin
When I came in to say goodnight.
We were to depart by train the next morning.
The train rides a swooshing corridor
Between the city and the country.
A silent green dream between
The yellow moody fog of Monet
And the bridges of Westminster.
And the bells rung all Christmas morning.
And the promenades filled with wolves
And hunting dogs, a morning sashay.
And the arcades held rainwater and
Curios, sandwich shops and mincemeat.
I felt their eyes watching me as I
Drank tea and mourned for company.
The ringing in my ears, an unknown
Recalibration or promenade,
An idealized perpetual circulation.
I lived in a tiny mummy jar
As a now defunct liver.
My humor was halved,
And my process short-lived.
Who could I help, trapped
In a clay jar without a bloody
Body to bathe me?
I longed to be reunited
With my fellow organs
In the dark folds of cells,
Infinite fields. I passaged to
Other places not my own.
In dreams, in murderous rumination,
In my conversations with my child
About the durability of bedrock.
I sung myself into transport,
Showing him how to light
The octave match of voice.
He hummed a dark bit of tunnel
Until he took flight
And lit the lightning within.
He glowed a strong spark
And I held him like a lantern.
This poem appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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Catherine Theis is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep and the play MEDEA. She is the translator of Slashing Sounds (University of Chicago Press, 2024), the first collection by the Italian poet Jolanda Insana to be published in English. She teaches at the University of Southern California.
