Barbara Quick
Three Poems
A Lesson Taken From the Green World
A sprig of basil from the basketful
I gathered for the pesto went astray.
And so I stuck it in a small glass vase
on the sill, to use on another day.
Inside that milky blue glass jar—inside
the stem, hidden from me—a miracle
of transformation took place. Root cells formed
while the stem marinated in water.
When an early frost ruined my garden—
when I needed a fresh leaf of basil,
cooking in lockdown—I plucked
the sprig out of the jar and found a plant,
Ready for soil, ready to grow again,
after such long days of deprivation.
The Writer’s Life in Lockdown
Determined to try to cut my own hair,
I note a similarity to the Herculean labor
of rewriting, yet again, my newest novel,
which is filled with so many words,
each of which needs to be considered
as I go forth with scissors.
I remind myself, looking for courage,
of what my stylist, Emily, used to say:
Divide and conquer!
I have so much hair that Emily always referred
to the second haircut and sometimes the third
I think of this while I stand outside
in the unforgiving sunlight,
a full-length mirror propped against the wall.
One lock at a time, I wind my hair around a brush,
peer at the ragged ends
and attempt to cut.
It’s tricky, in the mirror, to coordinate the interplay
of scissors, brush, and hand, when everything’s inverted
through an irksome law of physics guaranteed to impair
one’s looking-glass dexterity.
The tresses I bring forward from the back—
the only way to cut them—are by necessity
so close to my eyeballs that they’re difficult to see
with clarity.
Like those scenes I wrote and rewrote, so lovingly,
over the course of the last five years or so,
thinking I’d nailed them with each iteration.
The drudgery of editing is nothing like
the joy of creation.
The left side, which looks like the right side,
is looking not bad at all.
Only two-hundred-odd pages to go now,
to layer, to refine,
one god-damned hair
at a time.
Not a Time To Give Up the Fight
in memoriam Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Sometimes, all you can do is make the bread.
When the source of your protection
has flown the coop in panic,
and one of your great heroines is dead,
Look down at your own hands
that have known how to knead and turn
the mixture of flour, water and yeast
for half a century.
Your hands are so much wiser than the part of you
that wants to panic, too.
Think about the migratory birds,
so vulnerable in the vastness of sky.
They don’t give up. Each little body
keeps striving till the goal is reached
or the animating flame of life
goes out—
Even through the darkest night.
—Submitted on 12/21/2020
Barbara Quick is the author of The Light on Sifnos, co-winner of the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize. She is also the author of three novels, with another forthcoming in 2022. Her poems have appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Panoply, Mezzo Cammin, and Monterey Poetry Review, among other journals, as well as in anthologies including Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018). She lives in Sonoma County, Calif. Online at BarbaraQuick.com.
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