SoMa Literary Review

Coast

Katie M. Stence

There are mission grasses flying out to burning midlands,

ohlone wives turning their already swallowed heads.

Back where liquid hands shook aqua lungs,

the lies are breathing again.

Red earth came the first time in her dreams.

Years ago, there was deserted escape

now the native is harnessed to the intangible

her land once forced

to house others in the moodiest of bays.

There are others seeing loss.

Thirty-four stories up stands an Australian divorcee ex-opera singer

Her bones drawn ductile as she guides,

their child through her broken family.

Hands on and alone it shakes inside,

while she stares motionless carving the Hudson .

She sees the hunted ones slicing the water,

looking for upturned canoes--

seeking the strong ones who survived.

She wakes without sheets tearing.

Manhattan is burning again.

Once she came upon,

a man within a teepee on some greenery

in her own backyard extended.

She ran there in child form,

on through into the naked clouds.

She remembers the incense

singing her dreams.

Awake they all stand,

upon the bedrock of strength

oranges firing across the newborn sky.

Also by Katie M. Stence on SoMa Literary Review : Above Sea

San Francisco �s Katie Stence is a writer and editor currently traveling in New Zealand and Australia .