When Light Becomes a Slave of Hopelessness

exasperation from a gloomy stream

came and swallowed my little tears

when i was trying to reminisce the memories

of my love buried in a distant land 

beneath the house that produces hope.

my love is a very atypical love

treasured in the heart of tears

that lived on the plate of agony.

what would be your light to dream

if the person you agreed to share

your smiles with had built a hatred’s farm?

i was served a food in a burial shroud,

i was given a water to drink inside a casket,

i was asked to eat loneliness for many days

which my neurons would never remember.

so hope has become a distant land

that i can never perfume its nosegay,

& i know, thousands of kilometres are

atween my entire being and hope—

as all i eat is a cooked or boiled hopelessness.

1

fluffy goldfinches 

at the birdfeeder

spring snow flakes


a feather fluttering down

signals an intruder


Christina Chin/Kimberly Olmtak Gomes


2


spring rain 

fills the lily cups—

impassable stream


up to my knees

in a flooded street


Christina Chin/Kimberly Olmtak Gomes



3


sweet and plump

in the faded family photos

—aged envelopes


prying eyes search 

for a birth certificate


Christina Chin/Kimberly Olmtak Gomes

The Difference We Make
September 2013

Empty air was hissing
as from a gold string fob sifted on marble.
Some things take another thing
to make sense for them.

When I reached down to pick it up, the name
chestnut echoed as a keepsake to imagine
luck for my pocket, carried with change.

We gathered at Memorial Church to listen
to readings of your poems. None of them
were set in churches, allowing you this further
chance to resist yet also embellish
a welcoming exile and attempt to naturalize you.

One of the professors related your meditation
on the pastor’s beret, your insight into the thing’s
aerodynamic shape and lightness, holding it
like a frisbee between thumb and finger,
mind’s-eyeing it flung into the congregation.

The poet’s vision could perform the necessary
desanctification of the sacred, to share
grace for our laughter, which the pastor
for heaven’s sake might thank the poet for.

With vaults to echo the skies, the altar for
your or my supper table and by metonymy of use
the fruits of the earth, the earth itself,
a church makes a kind of poem of the world—
with acoustics especially for song
and speech, middle-earth in its edification
of a mind waking to meaning, to prayer, or to a poem
to articulate our wonder, to advocate for us,
for our reconciliation, to forge the soul
or, say, shape us, to belong, in the difference we make.

For something slightly unusual we guessed
our way down Brattle to the garden at Longfellow’s.
Starlings and a crow pecked in the grass.



A russet squirrel gnawing an acorn motioned
for us to follow the path along the beds
with labels for end of summer’s crestfallen roses—

onto a trellised vine. Wanting thoughts looked.
Were those real, clustered in perfect cone-shapes?
They couldn’t—could they be ripe? It would be wrong

to lift a handful—as my hand reached for the grapes
to roll and crush their tartness on my tongue
thinking this appropriate for a trade

poet’s memory, a frisson’s object
to flesh out the reed music Seamus Heaney made
with prudence and propriety to contradict.

Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, and The Poetry Porch.

Of his second book, On Earth As It Is, now available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted Steffen’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.

Beauty Is Where You Find It

We went to the art museum

But the art museum was closed.

My stomach hurts, and outside the clouds

Sit somewhere while I look at my phone.

That’s not art.

Closed Hearts 

 

She said I’m not what they say I am 

I can’t help but cry  

Just a little 

The knot in my throat  

And weight on my chest  

 

Leave it unsaid, he said 

She never mentioned how his silence hurt her 

Leave it unsaid, she said 

He didn’t tell her how many things were seething to come out 

Death by so many small nicks along the way 

You never know what goes on behind closed hearts 






Eating My Shovel 

 

Rolling in the cold San Diego waves  

the up brings life value  

and the down, maybe not 

 

I eat when I’m depressed,  

when I’m happy, whenever  

I self-medicate with coffee and food 

 

So many people say that life is too short 

I disagree 

Life is so, so long 

 

My hopes for happily ever after  

faded to midnight 

 

Every choice narrowed the prospects 

Fewer possibilities now  

 

I’ve dug too deep  

and the only tool I’ve kept is my shovel.  

 

 

My Dead Body 

 

At the funeral of my husband’s best friend’s father, for the first time, we broached the topic of what we want to happen to our dead bodies.  I have always wanted my body to be useful to others once I have lost any need for it. I told my husband that I want all of my remaining healthy organs donated, and the rest of me donated to science.  I would be happy for my body to be a cadaver or thrown out into those body farms in the middle or south United States to help forensic scientists hone their craft.  My husband was appalled at this.  He could see himself donating organs, but he wanted the rest of him buried, so his family would have a place to visit him.  I pointed out how environmentally unsound burial is and what a waste of human tissue, when he could help science, even after death.  After a bit of back and forth, we settled on organ donation, then becoming trees to be planted where our loved ones could visit, but we’d be friendly to the earth in death. 

 

He wants a headstone 

I just want to help someone 

We’ll see who dies first 







San Diego Beaches 

 

Heading north, waves chase my left side 

As the water pulls back, little puckers appear in the smooth wet sand 

The sand crabs are reaching toward the sun 

If I’m lucky, I’ll find a sand dollar 

Or one of those butterfly shells 

The former home of a muscle  

Clam 

Or oyster 

Splayed open 

Revealing its shiny vulnerable inside 

I remember when La Jolla’s seal beach 

Was once the children’s cove 

Instead of the home of so many ocean puppies 

It was the perfect wading spot for little ones 

Protected by the sea wall 

Bordered by tide pools 

We used to gently press our fingers  

Into the center of the sea anemone  

Until they recoiled into themselves 

Now the seals take up all the space 

And bark either in delight or warning 

To all who dare to venture near 







We Can All be a Stranger 

 

She knows exactly how  

to break my heart 

My perfect little girl 

with all those imperfections 

Her cherubic face 

makes me want to  

give her everything  

She wants and more 

my obligation as her mother 

is to not give her everything 

 

When she lies 

She’s a stranger 

When she’s obstinate  

She’s a stranger 

When I raise my voice 

I’m a stranger 

When I punish her 

I’m a stranger 

 

I can’t just be  

her best friend 

I cant just give  

her what she wants now 

I have to help guide her to the best self she can become 

My little girl is a woman  

in the making  

and the making is the hard part 


 

CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor accomplished in film, academia, and creative writing who performs, writes, signs, and rarely relaxes.  She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit.  CLS is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.