Post Apocalyptic Pastoral Poem by Stegner Fellow Jennifer Foerster

Jennifer Elise Foerster will be a guest speaker at our class this Thursday April 29 . Here is an excerpt from Magdalena's Fire, titled California

California 

 

 

I have been to the crater.

There were miles of chrysanthemums.

Palm trees swayed to the hum of the gas pumps.

Poppies lit up the hills and were eating the oak.

I gathered the acorns, dreamed in the ashes.

The white flock lifted from the chaparral

like a tattered wedding dress.

Planets were wheeling in the fault lines.

Pearls gathered at the coastline.

I was traveling the shore in a wooden boat

re-stringing the continent’s necklace.

Dragging a rack of whale ribs,

I carried the relics in my mouth,

met a woman named California,

could not pull her voice out.

I went to the arcade of angels,

offered my bucket of shells –

in exchange I was given a map of hell.

I hopped its dark barges,

dreamed beneath the fireworks.

There was a carousal on the beach and I

galloped the black stallion, offered my map

to the roller-skating cashier. In exchange

she gave me a pterodactyl’s tear.

I strung it on a thread,

wore it around my neck,

then rode the Daly City train

where I sat beside a geologist.

He gave me directions

to the sleeping volcano.

The clouds were oysters, opening

and closing. I trapped the blue pearl

and offered it to a fisherman.

In exchange he gave me

a dragon-scale kite.

I dozed beneath its shadow,

drank horchata at the cantina,

tangoed with a sailor

beneath the bone dry moon

then rented a motel room

between two highways. From there,

I could see the hills burn, the sky

shatter. I pushed a rickshaw of fossils

through deepening mud. My dreams

were the treasures of a sinking boat

as I awoke to the black horse

gnawing hot gravel, the maps

burnt to ashes in my mouth.