Califia Burning: Poems, 2012-2019

by Tennessee Reed

Overview

A new collection of poems from the American poet Tennessee Reed.

From “California Burning 2017-2018”

Will smoke days become the West’s new snow days?
When an early morning dagger of red light cuts through my curtains
I think of what I want to save in case I have to evacuate

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628973594
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	11/03/2020
Series:	American Literature
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

A graduate of UC Berkeley, Tennessee Reed is Secretary of Oakland PEN, and the author of the collections Circus in the Sky (I. Reed Books), Electric Chocolate (Raven's Bones Press), and Airborne (Raven's Bones Press). She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Mills College in 2005.

Read an Excerpt

It is no secret that I love to travel, especially by airplanes. I have studied airlines, their routes, hubs and safety records so long and so seriously that friends ask me to advise them on the best flights to book. I can still recite the flight numbers, dates of travel, airports and times of departure and landing for trips we made even ten, twenty, thirty years ago, which can prove handy, for instance, around tax time or when writing autobiographies. “The Study of a Young, Smiling Flight Attendant” and “Nihon No Ryokō” were both written in the summer of 1996 when I was nineteen years old and between my first and second years of college, after I had the great experience of traveling in Japan as arranged by the U.S. Department of State. On that trip I read at the University of Sapporo. These were all included in my third poetry collection, Airborne, which was published 1996 again by Raven’s Bones Press. I was in my second year of college.

The Story of a Young, Smiling Flight Attendant

In an American Airlines ad that appears on CNN
A young flight attendant walks down the gateway.
With a curious frown,
she’s looking at airplanes parked at the gates.
She is like the woman in Portrait of Victorine Meurent by the painter Édouard Manet.

The plane takes off.
It’s a DC-10.

Segue to inside the cabin.
A little girl kneels in her mom’s lap,
held close and tight as she looks over the back of a seat.
The mother and daughter are right out of
Madonna of the Chair by Raphael.
Her mother is pointing at something as they sit and talk by the window.

The young flight attendant appears again smiling at all the passengers like the woman in Pontormo’s
Portrait of a Young Woman.

Segue to outside, in a heavenly blue sky.
The American Airlines plane is flying,
like the angel in A Maiden’s Dream,
like Lorenzo Lotto.

Segue again to the plane’s interior.
A man and a woman holding hands like The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan Van Eyck.
The flight attendant is smiling at them like the woman in The Magdalen by
Bernadino Luini.

The screen turns black.
Ad copy rolls in white as a piano continues to play the advertising jingle.

I wish I’d met this flight attendant with her inviting smile who fooled me into thinking
I would find her in real life.

I found her in a movie,
called Baby’s Day Out.
She played a mother looking for her baby who had memorized the images in a book and traveled all over town looking for the images just like I traveled over four centuries to find images in the world’s museums that matched that perfect world.

1996

Nihon No Ryokō
(Japanese Travel)

You can’t always take the airline you want to take like American or TWA
sometimes you have to take whatever’s cheaper like United or Northwest

You can’t always sit by the window on the airplane sometimes you have to sit by the aisle or in the middle

You can’t always get
American food like hamburgers, pizza eggs, and ham sometimes you can only eat Japanese food like sushi, teriyaki, sunomono, and chawanmushi

You can’t stay in one place all of the time sometimes you have Shinkansen to or from a new city daily like Osaka or Tokyo

You can’t always find clunky heeled loafer
Japanese school girl shoes in your size in Kobe or Kyoto sometimes you have to go to Nagoya to find them

You can’t always rely on following the schedule like when I was told we would go exploring in the morning or eat at a certain restaurant sometimes you have to accept last minute change like when our guide decided to choose a restaurant where we sat on tatami mats instead of a Chinese restaurants where we could sit on chairs, like at home

You can’t get a hotel room with a big space like the Righa Royal in Hiroshima you sometimes have to stay in a tiny hole-in-the-wall like the Personal Hotel in Fukuoka, where the price is good

You won’t find the U.S.
everywhere but you will find courteous people everywhere safe streets and subways at night full of people having fun the walking signal on traffic lights playing “Coming Through the Rye”
and 1001 golden visions at Sanjusangendo moats surrounding the walls of Nijo Castle red, yellow, or white triangles on selected windows of high rise glass skyscrapers the mixture of gray rock, raked granite and luscious green gardens at the Silver Pavilion the stork, with his beak striped in pastels like a Richard Diebenkorn painting as he stares from a rock at the Miyajima Aquarium and a herd of deer following you, asking to be fed on the beach at the Itsukushima Shrine

1996

I wrote “Choosing Sides” in the fall of 1998 after I had just transferred from Laney College and begun my junior year at the University of California at Berkeley. This was during a lengthy hiatus from writing poetry, because I was concentrating on writing my memoir, Spell Alburquerque: Memoirs of a ‘Difficult’ Student (CounterPunch/AK Press, 2009). That prose project went through many changes over the twelve years it took to complete. “Choosing Sides” shows me at twenty-one years, still trying to figure out who I was. It was published in The San Francisco Chronicle that fall.

Choosing Sides

In America everybody belongs to one team and people like me are always asked to choose sides

Every day I feel like I’m trying out for something because people put pressure on me to choose one race or one religion or to join them in their cause

Black people say to me
“Your father is Black?
I don’t see any Black in you.”
White people say to me,
“You have Russian, Irish,
French, Danish and Scottish?
You look Mexican, Indian,
Black and Asian.”
Native Americans say to me,
“You look Mexican,
Black and White to me. You don’t look Cherokee.”
Asians say to me, “Your
Mother has some Asian ancestors?
I would have never guessed.”
Latinos and Chicanos are disappointed when they ask me,
“Hablo español?”
and I reply, “Un poquito.”

People tell me that my parents should have thought of this before they had me because as one woman put it,
“God says that Blacks should marry Blacks,
and Whites should marry Whites.
Christians should marry Christians and Jews should marry Jews.”
(I can’t find that quote in the Bible)

1998

“The City Beautiful” was written two years later, in the fall of 2000, following my research for a paper on San Francisco’s City Hall, one of my favorite buildings, and the City Beautiful Movement. I was twenty-three and in my senior year at U.C. Berkeley. It was also published in The San Francisco Chronicle

The City Beautiful

Five hundred feet high and five hundred thousand square feet wide of polished brass, marble, wrought iron carved stone and Manchurian wood
City Hall towers over San Francisco’s Civic Center with 24-karat gold leaf shimmering on its dome while homeless citizens shuffle around the public library and the Civic Center BART station in muddy blue jeans and black sweatshirts dappled with pigeon droppings

Workers rush from BART and the MUNI metro and climb the grand marble rotunda staircase to their City Hall offices in their expensive DKNY and Ralph Lauren suits while homeless people push all their belongings in shopping carts and talk about buying booze at the convenience store in the corner of Market and Eighth Streets

Students catch elevators to the History Room at the San Francisco Public Library while security officers harass homeless women trying to use the restroom

Parents and children dressed up to see “The Nutcracker”
at the War Memorial Opera House another fancy marble, gold, and red velvet confection pass by homeless people sitting on rotting wood benches in the United Nations Plaza freezing and wet from the rain

At City Hall’s opening day ceremony protesters shouted, “Food, not gold leaf.”

2000

Table of Contents

Foreword xi

Introduction Lamont B. Steptoe iv

2012

The Mid-Afternoon Brain Freeze 3

A Sonnet to American Airlines 5

New York City Villanelle 6

Lake Temescal Caste Royale 7

2013

City Dwellers, Part Two 8

The Two Friendly Geese 12

Dear Grandma Reed 15

Miami: A Mural 17

Brussels Sprouts 22

Dear Pink 24

Tanasi River 26

Jerusalem 30

2014

L.R. Californicus 34

Swimming 40

How High the Moon 42

Strawberry 46

I've Got the Climate Change Blues 48

Ethnic Blues 50

2015

Hapalochlaena Lunulata 53

Spike the Iguana 55

Family Feud 57

Like An Old Friend Whom You Had Given Up for Dead Rain Returns to Oakland 61

A Flat Will Survive the Sun 63

Garden Duchess and Duke 66

Untitled in Two Parts 68

Sauced English Teacher 70

Earth's Black Hole 73

Point of View of a Blood Orange 76

Children's Bizarre 78

The Avalanche of Sils im Engadin 80

Paris 82

2016

Why No Flowers for Africa? 87

Winter Border Sweater Tights 91

For Antonio Ramos 93

GQ 95

Ode to Fruit Loops 98

Beyond Pluto 100

Plantain 103

Mulhouse, France 105

The Dream 107

Post Racism 109

Alton Sterling and Philando Castile 111

Wednesday, November 9, 2016 113

2017

I Have Worn It for Over Thirty Years 116

Ode to the Vegan 119

Viaggio Italiano (Italian Travel) 121

You Can't Only Call Them White Nationalists 124

2018

Nola 126

My Last Poem About Plastic Shoes 129

My First Poem About Nike Sneakers 131

A Haiku to the Super Blue Blood Moon 133

Barcelona Haiku 134

Spring 2018 135

Cancer 138

Life Lessons from the Peanut Gallery 140

Thoughts in My Forties 143

California Burning 2017-2018 145

Look Before You Leap 149

Llamas Are the New Unicorns 152

Holiday Specials 154

2019

2018 Contemplation 156

(Parody of James Tate's Last Poem) Flight Attendant 157

(Parody of Clarence Major's "Supply and Demand) Hair, the Sequel, 1992-2019 160

"The Change": Growing Up Part Three 163

Acknowledgements 166

About the Author 168

Interviews

It is no secret that I love to travel, especially by airplanes. I have studied airlines, their routes, hubs and safety records so long and so seriously that friends ask me to advise them on the best flights to book. I can still recite the flight numbers, dates of travel, airports and times of departure and landing for trips we made even ten, twenty, thirty years ago, which can prove handy, for instance, around tax time or when writing autobiographies. “The Study of a Young, Smiling Flight Attendant” and “Nihon No Ryokō” were both written in the summer of 1996 when I was nineteen years old and between my first and second years of college, after I had the great experience of traveling in Japan as arranged by the U.S. Department of State. On that trip I read at the University of Sapporo. These were all included in my third poetry collection, Airborne, which was published 1996 again by Raven’s Bones Press. I was in my second year of college.

The Story of a Young, Smiling Flight Attendant

In an American Airlines ad

that appears on CNN

A young flight attendant

walks down the gateway.

With a curious frown,

she’s looking at airplanes

parked at the gates.

She is like the woman

in Portrait of Victorine Meurent

by the painter Édouard Manet.

The plane takes off.

It’s a DC-10.

Segue to inside the cabin.

A little girl kneels in her mom’s lap,

held close and tight

as she looks over the back of a seat.

The mother and daughter are right out of

Madonna of the Chair by Raphael.

Her mother is pointing at something

as they sit and talk

by the window.

The young flight attendant appears again

smiling at all the passengers

like the woman in Pontormo’s

Portrait of a Young Woman.

Segue to outside, in a heavenly blue sky.

The American Airlines plane is flying,

like the angel in A Maiden’s Dream,

like Lorenzo Lotto.

Segue again to the plane’s interior.

A man and a woman

holding hands

like The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan Van Eyck.

The flight attendant is smiling at them

like the woman in The Magdalen by

Bernadino Luini.

The screen turns black.

Ad copy rolls in white

as a piano continues to play

the advertising jingle.

I wish I’d met this flight attendant

with her inviting smile

who fooled me into thinking

I would find her in real life.

I found her in a movie,

called Baby’s Day Out.

She played a mother

looking for her baby

who had memorized the images

in a book

and traveled

all over town

looking for the images

just like I traveled

over four centuries

to find images

in the world’s museums

that matched

that perfect world.

1996

Nihon No Ryokō

(Japanese Travel)

You can’t always take the airline

you want to take like American or TWA

sometimes you have to take whatever’s cheaper

like United or Northwest

You can’t always

sit by the window

on the airplane

sometimes you have to sit

by the aisle or

in the middle

You can’t always get

American food

like hamburgers, pizza

eggs, and ham

sometimes you can

only eat Japanese food like

sushi, teriyaki, sunomono, and chawanmushi

You can’t stay in one place

all of the time

sometimes you have Shinkansen to or from

a new city daily

like Osaka or Tokyo

You can’t always find clunky heeled loafer

Japanese school girl shoes

in your size in Kobe or Kyoto

sometimes you have to go to Nagoya

to find them

You can’t always rely on following the schedule

like when I was told

we would go exploring in the morning

or eat at a certain restaurant

sometimes you have to accept

last minute change like when our guide decided to choose

a restaurant where we sat on tatami mats

instead of a Chinese restaurants

where we could sit on chairs, like at home

You can’t get a hotel room

with a big space like the Righa Royal in Hiroshima

you sometimes have to stay in a tiny

hole-in-the-wall

like the Personal Hotel

in Fukuoka, where the price is good

You won’t find the U.S.

everywhere

but you will find courteous people everywhere

safe streets and subways at night

full of people having fun

the walking signal on traffic lights

playing “Coming Through the Rye”

and 1001 golden visions at Sanjusangendo

moats surrounding the walls of Nijo Castle

red, yellow, or white triangles

on selected windows

of high rise glass skyscrapers

the mixture of gray rock, raked granite

and luscious green gardens

at the Silver Pavilion

the stork, with his beak striped in pastels

like a Richard Diebenkorn painting

as he stares from a rock at the Miyajima Aquarium

and a herd of deer following you, asking to be fed

on the beach at the Itsukushima Shrine

1996

I wrote “Choosing Sides” in the fall of 1998 after I had just transferred from Laney College and begun my junior year at the University of California at Berkeley. This was during a lengthy hiatus from writing poetry, because I was concentrating on writing my memoir, Spell Alburquerque: Memoirs of a ‘Difficult’ Student (CounterPunch/AK Press, 2009). That prose project went through many changes over the twelve years it took to complete. “Choosing Sides” shows me at twenty-one years, still trying to figure out who I was. It was published in The San Francisco Chronicle that fall.

Choosing Sides

In America

everybody belongs to one team

and people like me

are always asked to choose sides

Every day I feel

like I’m trying out for something

because people put pressure on me

to choose one race

or one religion

or to join them in their cause

Black people say to me

“Your father is Black?

I don’t see any Black in you.”

White people say to me,

“You have Russian, Irish,

French, Danish and Scottish?

You look Mexican, Indian,

Black and Asian.”

Native Americans say to me,

“You look Mexican,

Black and White to me. You

don’t look Cherokee.”

Asians say to me, “Your

Mother has some Asian ancestors?

I would have never guessed.”

Latinos and Chicanos

are disappointed when they ask me,

“Hablo español?”

and I reply, “Un poquito.”

People tell me that my parents

should have thought of this

before they had me

because as one woman put it,

“God says that Blacks should marry Blacks,

and Whites should marry Whites.

Christians should marry Christians

and Jews should marry Jews.”

(I can’t find that quote in the Bible)

1998

“The City Beautiful” was written two years later, in the fall of 2000, following my research for a paper on San Francisco’s City Hall, one of my favorite buildings, and the City Beautiful Movement. I was twenty-three and in my senior year at U.C. Berkeley. It was also published in The San Francisco Chronicle

The City Beautiful

Five hundred feet high

and five hundred thousand square feet wide

of polished brass, marble, wrought iron

carved stone and Manchurian wood

City Hall towers over San Francisco’s Civic Center

with 24-karat gold leaf shimmering on its dome

while homeless citizens

shuffle around the public library

and the Civic Center BART station

in muddy blue jeans and black sweatshirts

dappled with pigeon droppings

Workers rush from BART and the MUNI metro

and climb the grand marble rotunda staircase

to their City Hall offices

in their expensive DKNY and Ralph Lauren suits

while homeless people push all their belongings

in shopping carts

and talk about buying booze at the convenience store

in the corner of Market and Eighth Streets

Students catch elevators to the History Room

at the San Francisco Public Library

while security officers harass homeless women

trying to use the restroom

Parents and children

dressed up to see “The Nutcracker”

at the War Memorial Opera House

another fancy marble, gold, and red velvet confection

pass by homeless people sitting on rotting wood benches

in the United Nations Plaza

freezing and wet from the rain

At City Hall’s opening day ceremony

protesters shouted, “Food, not gold leaf.”

2000