You had me at museum. You had me at Joyce. You had me in the bushes by the college campus lake. We’d laugh while water cascaded all over us. I tasted you in every beach-side mussel you cooked, steamed over the pine needle pyramid you kindled by rubbing wood. You taught me heat and we made our own heat, rubbing. Today the sky is haze, the clouds indistinguishable.

I swim alone, now, the Skatalites on my MP3. Remember how we danced to that beat? Then I dropped that album and it cracked. Then you dropped me and I cracked. Pieces everywhere—a project on my floor—until, over time, piece by piece, I healed them gold with lacquer. Still you dropped frequently into my dreams. These days I text twice a year. The wildfires still burn, but elsewhere. The AQI is so high I choke. Now that you’re nursing cancer treatment, I sign my messages XO.

Canadian wildfires
burning
old wounds

Carla Schwartz’s

poems appear in The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics (Terrapin Books, 2018), and in her collections: Signs of Marriage (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Mother, One More Thing (Turning Point, 2014), and Intimacy with the Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Recent and forthcoming curations include contemporary haibun online, great weather for MEDIA, The MacGuffin, Modern Haiku, North Dakota Quarterly, ONE ART, Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Spank the Carp.

Schwartz’s poem “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E. E. Cummings Prize. And she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in 2023.

Learn more at the poet’s website, which includes links to her poetry and performance videos: https://www.carlapoet.com/

See also the poet’s YouTube channel, which features documentary and how-to videos about her off-the-grid, solar-powered tiny houseboat: CB99Videos

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Chill Season by Carla Schwartz in Poets for Science: The Nature of Our Times (3 January 2025)

⚡ Musing Weather, an anomalous haibun by Schwartz in Issue 20.3 of contemporary haibun online (1 December 2024)

⚡ Contemplating Humanity While Swimming by Schwartz in Verse-Virtual (July 2024)

⚡ Two poems (“Saying Goodbye to My Father” and “Not Merely a Player on this World’s Stage”) in Verse-Virtual (September 2023)

⚡ Two poems (“Umbilical” and “How He Leaves”) in Issue 24 of The Ear (2021)