Five Poems by Kirsten Abel

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SISTER

Each day it becomes more urgent.
I have to stop wanting every Christina I meet
to be you.

When I first learned, I wanted to know
if you looked like me. If you got boobs in the fourth grade
and if they were bigger

than those of any girl in school
except Margie Jackson. I was afraid to show you
my childhood, the firs

around Waughop Lake draped in grey,
the manna grass and the sedge bent in the wind. How I used to
laugh as the wild rabbits 

nipped and dashed through the blackberry
thickets at the edge of Elliot’s property. But now I cannot keep
these things to myself:

the lake, the meandering trails, the pond turtles
and Elliot’s blue roan. Please don’t hate me. I’m not sorry
I was kept.

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DRY ROT

You are slicing a mango at the kitchen counter.
Now and then the knife grates against the core.
You can see two old chairs stacked cushion to cushion
outside on the front porch, which is rotting.
No one has called the landlord about it.
Each rain softens the wood a little more
like flax retting in a shallow bog.
One day a foot will fall through. 
When that happens you will simply start carrying
the groceries in through the back.
All things considered, you think
this an acceptable kind of loneliness,
an empty slender tunnel with a door built halfway through
in case of emergencies.
You stand in the kitchen. 
You sweep the mango peels one by one into the trash.
They hit the bottom with a muffled drum.

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INYO COUNTY

The closest thing to water
here is the rumor of it. 

Better no lake at all
than one that chokes the eyes.

Better no hills than ones
that spark a thirst for seafaring.   

There’s no screw sloop here. 
No crew. Just the name—Alabama—

unfurling madly across the valley
of the tongue. 

But still a few people stay.
They attend the Nazarene church.

They sit in the famous diner
and if they long for the sea, for waves 

surging to a break,
the desert arches suffice.

Most have never left California
and at first, I judge them for it.

But then night swells over
the Inyo Mountains and calms the lake

full of dust. I learn the moon
here is the color of elks’ breath

and that evening snow blooms pearl
white against the muted red 

and the rocks. An alkali dust storm
may hit tomorrow 

but no one’s worried. It happens. 
The elk are bugling.

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SHORE PINE SPEAKS

Up on these licked cliffs,
the early fog settles still
over the jetty and I want to say
I would belong to you.
But I am easily swayed.
I would give myself to anyone
with a salt wind
or a caw.

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THE BIG ONE

I am watching the birds like a bride
eyes a black cloud swelling
out towards her wedding tent.
They say signs of the Big One could be evident
in volcanoes’ and animals’ patterns.
They say the birds will survive. 
A simple triggering shiver
and then flight
til it’s over.
I want to think of something else.
Like are the Mariners good now or what
happened to Liv Tyler or to those kids
from high school
who went to live in the woods.
But this brief dip
into distraction always
circles back
to cruel lucidity, circles back
again to the birds
circling the city—its delis
full of meat, 
its beautiful libraries, its trucks,
its kids—all spilling out into the Sound
with ease. 

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