Andrena Zawinski’s third and recently released poetry collection is Landings. Her poems have received accolades for free verse, form, lyricism, spirituality, and social concern. She is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com and founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon.
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At Pine Cove
After trailing the wooded misty path to the cove,
feet sliding on wet sands downhill,
after watching abalone poachers
rise wet suited from the waters with their sea troves,
we brave the climb back
steadying ourselves on thick branches and each other.
Back to the inn’s rickety writing table
where a pot of market soup of the day waits
to be warmed, wedge of peppered cheese
and crusty baguette on the board,
Anderson Valley wine picked up on the way in
along ribboning S curves that carried us here.
We slip into oversized cable knits,
sale priced at the local mercantile, settle into
the blustery night opening a door to the sky’s
threat of storm, where we will remain inside
safe and dry. Just two women getting ready
for dinner in lodging near the sea,
getting ready to drift off to sleep
wrapped in a sash of fog and the warmth of each other,
old dog at our feet already snoring under the table
where a vase hugs three stems of fragrant Stargazers,
their musky heads tilted the way women
stop to talk along coastal garden trails,
ears of the cove listening in.
~
Haibun for Crows
(…whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core—Poe)
Two crows fix eyes on me. Flapping, they twitter, rattle, and click
unlike yesterday’s loosening of brash caws as I first passed under
the tree, the tree where now a dead one lies belly down and beak up.
The murder descends, mobbing as if to decide some fate in cackles
and chirps. Then as suddenly as landing, they lift off—
span the open sky
in thick branches of black sheen
crisscrossing clear blue
~
ISACOUSTIC* 