Lara Gularte (3 poems)
WHERE THE DOVES GO
I see them fly en masse—
soar, dip, whirl.
On mission, they send messages,
and the sky goes to coo.
These peaceniks have known another world,
pulsate between stars,
gleam in the freezing night.
They slip into downy warmth,
face forces of wind and ice.
Wings cover the sky.
In their descent,
darkness falls on their flight of faith,
and they find hail on the dove cote roof.
White birds on frayed phone wire hang on hope.
With the smell of burning feathers—
no peaceful ascent.
All eternity earthbound.
These days I’m a wingless bird
struggling to take flight,
condor on my shoulder.
THE YEAR SHE LOST HER WHEREABOUTS
She travels the path of the glacier
carrying the world with her.
A blizzard claws her,
and she turns her knife to a mountain cat’s throat.
To repent for the kill, she prays, asks for favors,
hears angels howl like wolves.
Seen from a distance a field of them,
wings folded into fur.
The seraphs drool of moon
stroke her with their paws.
Snow covers her, and she sleeps,
waits for the season of warming.
Time passes till she steps out of snow melt,
staggers among carrion and crags, downed limbs,
comes upon birds not heard from for years
who cross clouds like borders.
Something final has begun
with nothing she can do to stop it.
FOURTH WORLD WOMAN
A fugitive of the modern world, she’s tired of deep lies,
and anthems, the marble limbs of statues on the ground.
When smoky skies erase mountains and eagles,
shroud angry riots in town,
she craves the peace of forest creatures.
Imagining a fourth world the rustle of wild grass beguiles her.
The animal inside teaches her to have visions, to watch for signs.
Night moves through her, breathes and stretches,
a cold nose touching her.
She snatches the mouse from the cat’s mouth, sets it free.
Suddenly antlers shadow the sky and she hurts a beautiful pain.
She molts off her former selves for a furred face, nostrils slanting.
At the crest she stands doe-like, hooves in place,
waits for a deluge to cleanse the ailing earth.
Lara Gularte lives and writes in the Sierra foothills of California. Her writing may be found in The Gávea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry, and in Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora in the United States and Canada anthologies as well as various literary journals. The esteemed critic Vamberto Freitas has reviewed her work in Da Poética ancestral Luso-Americana in Açoriano Oriental and Nas Duas Margens. Gularte earned an MFA degree from San Jose State University. She is a poetry instructor for the California Arts-in-Corrections program at Folsom, and Mule Creek prisons. Kissing the Bee is her first full-length poetry collection.