Andrena Zawinski

Andrena Zawinski's fourth full poetry collection, Born Under the Influence, is recently released and can be found on Amazon. Her poems have received accolades for free verse, form, lyricism, spirituality, and social concern. She founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon.

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► Andrena's microchaps & selected poems are available below. Download the microchap by clicking on the title.

Origami Microchap
Starstruck		- Selected Poems
Click title to open microchap Cover art by Julia Carrasquero •	Starstruck My father smacked my mother in the chest with a softball he pitched, a curveball the batter missed in the Pressed Steel break yard where striking hellraisers once fought off company goons. Nothing soft about that ball or their meeting as she wailed clutching her breast, tears coursing cheeks as she shrieked: “I see stars!” And as the story goes, it was a real love at first sight, or so they said. As he lifted her up off her feet she winced from pain, like some meteor had flown off course to her heart to make a moment, one that once you’ve had it, completely forgivable and unforgettable. The rest of their lives would go on that way beneath constellations of lost jobs, bad luck, Orion tightening the belt at food lines and welfare visits to their cold water flat to check on their kids. A meteor disguised as a baseball brought them together in something bigger than they could every dream alone, but unlike Cepheus and Cassiopeia, they would not live on together forever. He got lost gambling, fighting, boozing— a roughneck waiting for luck to turn that never did. At his death she asked, as if I could know: “What did your father see in me?” And I answered, as if I knew: “Stars in your eyes.” —Tule Review	Nocturnal Haibun for Fireflies Caravaggio laced paint with their iridescence. In Frost’s garden, they were stars to fill the sky. Children catch their lightning dance in jars, smear their sheen across fingers and wrists. sparks of fireflies ignite summer’s shimmering nocturnal courtship They are Cherokee torches turning dark into starry nights, Japanese hotaru of deep love, Chinese hing hoy souls of the dead. dancing dark heavens glittering luminaries make concerts of light —Aurorean Poetry Journal Somnambular Sonnet for Gitano The baby dozed in a hammock on the veranda, day cooling down as I mounted the Andalusian nuzzling my boy. We wandered along the trail to the lake’s fenced meadow. Gitano nibbled clover as the sun dropped down, dormant volcano in the distance. Dark falling over us, the gelding came to a halt, neighed, backed up, would not move at my nudge. My focus honed on a string of barb wire ahead. Arms wrapped about his neck, I buried my face in his mane, rode back in surrender, slid into the hammock, cradled my child, a fiery lake blazing beneath my drooping lids, whinny from the paddock a lullaby to my ears.	my documents (an excerpt) …hold onto these memories, they are my documents, these words my guarantee of sanity— your cell, my cell where near night everything teeters but will not fall with you wild as you were, startled crow staggering the bridge rail drunken with sky… –from “Four Cells,” Santa Clara Review Things That Come and Go Wash of sea foam at low tide, wind kicking in on a drift of waves. Message in a bottle bobbing about imaginary shores. Sunny side of leafy trees swathed in wings of shade. Bee buzzing flower blossoms, petals in the sidewalk cracks. Canary’s song longing for flight toward the sun. Stars sparkling in the night sky, earthshine of a crescent moon. First breath, first kiss, first love, lasting only as long as they exist. Coming to these things that come then go, moths to flames. —Highland Park Poetry • Andrena Zawinski © 2023
She
Click title to open microchap Cover adapted from Irena Orlov’s Birds on Wood •	She, the one you call sister Cento for Adrienne Rich from eight books Wear the weight of equinoctial evening, autumn torture the old signs— a cracked wall in the garden, all night eating the heart out. Underneath my lid another eye has opened. She is the one you call sister. Night life. Letters, journals, bourbon, the stars will come out over and over— a clear night if the mind were clear, you there with your gazing eyes, a dark woman, head bent, listening for something at the oak table under the ceiling fan. This woman the heart of the matter, little as I knew you I know you. . The I you know isn’t me you said. It’s not new this condition, just for awhile. She, the one who is my songbird, a cherita you are mi pajarilla your voice wings the open roads above palms and pines and hills you are that song in my head the one that just won’t quit you are mi amor, querida mia mi cantadora, you are the swing and fast step of joropo and cumbia, you are my slap and clap and yip as you sing and strum para toda la vida tu eres you are	She’d Sit and Sew A curious gladness shook me.—Stanley Kunitz Evenings she’d sit there rocking and sewing, darning a sock, stitching a tattered buttonhole, hemming a skirt, or the more elaborate projects crocheting a hat, shawl, or throw as if this private piece work were its own peace. Even as repetition weakened her weary hands, she sometimes reached down to tousle my hair as I slumped in a sleepy heap at her feet, and when through the dusty blind slats a thin thread of light streaked across my lap, it was then that curious gladness shook me. She, the queen bee marries winter Cento for Sylvia Plath from Colossus and Ariel The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges, each wave-tip glitters like a knife. Gulls mulled in the greenest light face the bald-faced sun with their gifts to a difficult borning. Clear vowels rising like balloons: I shall be good as new, love, love my season. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it? I eat men like air that kill, that kill, that kill. The queen bee marries the winter of your year. Eye, the cauldron of mourning, starless and fatherless, a dark water asks nothing of life, of the profane grail, the dreaming skull, the mausoleum, the wax house. The box is only temporary.	Landay for the Woman on the Floor Looming large over a hundred years in brick and mortar, around the corner stood that house, the one just across from the long weeds skirting the railroad tracks in the flats. And in that house was a woman, oak door swung wide open, sunlight catching strands of her silver hair, jewel-eyed, staring at me and my dog walking by. Then in a sudden urgency she would belly crawl closer to the splintered threshold, using her thick forearms to lug her body along the worn planked floor. She never spoke, only stared up at us. I never spoke, never could once muster the words: “How are you?” “Can I help you?” “What do you need?” Empty questions like promises would not be offered to the woman on the floor rubbing her ashen face with calloused palms in the routine of days crawling on her stomach across the boards to the door, she so resolute in memory and my persistent wondering: “Who opens the door?” • Andrena Zawinski © 2021
Drifting Sands
Click on title to download PDF micro Cover photo by author	Tanka for the Supermoon and You …in this place the gods touched earth… —Jim Harrison full moon rising up the sun setting in spring sky glides and hovers balances light with dark chiaroscuro equinox gladdening the earth with light Dancing Zuihitsu The lone baleen circles and circles, water sprite at home in the lagoon off the bay, having lost her way North. So thin, so weak, her knob head rises every minute to catch a breath. I stand waiting for her breach, for fins to slap the surface sheen, for a burst of blowhole spray. I am afraid she may beach, join other ghosts hugging the breast of the coast, language of grief upon me even before the loss. I daydream dancing at water’s edge, feet slippered in sand, balancing en pointe between sea and sky, ocean spray joining in on the buoy’s song. Sun is about to set itself down as day begins to blur, the nosy moon poking its nose through scattering clouds. A train sounds its horn across the distant square. A car alarm goes unheeded at the curb. Rippling waves lap the shore, lick the weathered dock. The whale rises again and again, slaps, sprays, circles, circles, and circles. Butterflies flirt milkweed. Honey bees buzz poppies. Their wings, their perpetual disappearing act, a performance in pirouettes skittering off stage behind drawn curtains ballooned by day’s last breath of wind.	Drifting Zuihitsu My dreams carry me to barren stretches of concrete peppered by flattened buttons of stone beyond the stars on a precipice from which to view the world. Everything couples in greens and browns. Walks are long and steady with no vision for what came before, what is to follow. Curtains are drawn, doors latched. There is no entrance, no welcome. I inhale the sky, it’s blues and whites, its silences. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.* Breezy jazz off a ragged skiff drifts along the lick of water to its boat in the slip, bat ray nearing its bow. I squint hard in the bright of summer’s sun, doze wrapped in a warm blanket of air. Foggy silhouettes of my dead in cruciform tiptoe through, shushing each other, knowing I am sure to shoo them off. Wind chimes dance and slide their cymbals against each other. Dark flocks of geese squawk inside the beat of their wide wings. My time to fly has yet to be born in me. *Calvino Zuihitsu (1000 AD) is a free form of fragments responding to surroundings whose text “follows the brush” or “drifts like clouds.”	Triolet for the Return of Spring So much to love about it, the again again again of it, the breeze on pampas grass seaside. So much to love about it the riots of wildflowers, return of green, the singing birds, the simple daily beat. So much to love about it, the again again again of it. Ode to You, Hummingbird Your talent for flight–– the synchronicity of wing beat, hover, and float, your acrobatic repertoire, you little wind dancer. Your hunger for nectar–– the harvest of trumpet blossom, of scarlet day rocket or common fuchsia bloom, with a slither of tongue. Your gorget, its shimmer–– where I want your tiny body to take me on its route of evanescence* out among the glitterings. * from Emily Dickinson’s “Hummingbird” • Andrena Zawinski © 2019
Blood Moon and other Haibun
Click on title to download PDF micro Cover artwork by Lauri Burke Credits Blood Moon Haibun first appeared in Mantis Literary Review, Stanford University 2017; Haibun for Crows first appeared in isacoustics online. - Every microchap may be downloaded for free from this website. (Set printer for landscape)	Blood Moon Haibun Unlike the span of light from the harvest moon of Algonquin lore during the turn of leaves in October, this blood moon slips in on a gusty April wind in lingering twilight, ducks squawking at their brood beneath the blowsy clouds. This blood moon enters without hysteria of prophetic revelation, or proffered theories for asteroids or meteorite storms––it is enough to be this big bright planet in the Earth’s shadow blood moon blazes red-orange sunbeams at its edges	San Francisco Haibun in Fire Season Like some fata morgana, the San Francisco skyline rises through morning fog, regal optic white spires flanked by waves of watercolor hills and feathered clouds. Above, distant Saturn’s icy moon spews salt water plumes from its icy crust, but here there is the smoke and haze of wildfires in on a wind shift. cool jazz on the radio we cover our faces in cloaked surrender Haibun at Dusk at Water’s Edge Sailboats slip into their docks for the night. Droopy lidded curtains cross windows. The music of a party yacht boasts its entry, dog onboard a nearby slip barking and howling. The neighbor’s cats corral and screech, ruffle bushy blossoms of marigolds perfuming dusk. A peachy sky turns weighty, slate of gray mourning, sunken corpses in rough channels. A continent away, cities darken and public places empty. Sidewalks littered with shattered glass and broken hearts remain in vigil along streets of the dead and wounded, laughter and conversation buried beneath night covers where lovers should turn and touch and talk. Tip your wine glasses to sky, toast the moon’s craters, even with its smile turned downward.	Haibun for Crows (...whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core—Poe) Two crows fix eyes on me. Flapping, they twitter, rattle, and click unlike yesterday’s loosening of brash caws as I first passed under their tree, the pine where now a dead one lies belly down and beak up. The murder descends, mobbing as if to decide some fate in cackles and chirps. T hen as suddenly as landing, they lift off— span the open sky in thick branches of black sheen crisscrossing clear blue Alaskan Haibun (Sailing past Tracy Arm, Juneau ) Spruce and hemlock pepper sheared granite cliffs sculpted by ice age glaciers where waterfalls trickle and an avalanche rumbles and tumbles down in crumbling walls of snow, in a summer melt, surface of the fjord dusted brown, crackling and popping. at water’s edge seals mount blue rafts, teach pups to swim and rest, swim and rest ● Andrena Zawinski© 2018

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