Californian Poets: Part II

Grant Hier

Three Poems

Interview

Back to Front

(after Louis MacNeice)

What she didn’t want
was want. Numbness.
Something less. Hidden
within were hard remnants.
And more—
Memories of reversal
all the more real:

Orange peels, dried
like chips forgotten
in a napkin
left in the bottom of her
summer purse.
Far worse—those things hard
that started soft:

Part of a laugh
after she fell, pretending.
Fall’s trembling at limb’s end. Dangling
angels stiff in a tree, balanced.
The glance she held
well beyond comfort
or want.

Watchers

(a folded sonnet)

After the long walk home,
after damp shoes are shed,
showered bodies flop still
glistening across new sheets.

After the rain comes down
in dusk as half-sleet reflected,
a scrim around the static
half-sleep of those collapsed

just now touching at the feet
in their sprawled solitudes,
creatures with closed eyes
larger than knowledge—comes

a creature with larger eyes still
through the blue distance, through
hard darkness then unnamed light,
to the path the couple walked, to

orbit a crater pocked in the dirt
made by a drop of sweat, its salt
now a ring of white around the edges,
a period, a reminder—as when we stop to

look to the moon, even in sleep,
or to where the moon once hung
with its own gray craters unseen,
stark in its one bounce of sunlight.

Despite the hours falling, the blind work
of the heart, how we are still, in the end,

just that: sparks thrown at the start, drawn
and circling—far more here than sensed.

To the wind the stem that once I thought would save now bends

[ a Fibonacci spiral reversing ]

To turn to
the wind—the
wind that unwinds
the dead vine from the
stem of rose, that tallest stem
that sways, the dried morning glory cord that
once strangled now unraveling at last, reluctantly (once
I had wound myself around something I
thought wanted me, so I thought)—
would not be wise, would
save not one. Save
now: what now
bends unbends.

Author Bio:

Grant Hier previously served as the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Anaheim, California (2018- 2020). His book Untended Garden was awarded Prize Americana and nominated for both an American Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Other poetry books include The Difference Between and Similitude. A new collection, Lirae—394 Poems in 365 Days, is forthcoming. Individual poems have won such awards as the Kick Prize and the Nancy Dew Taylor Prize for poetry, been published in literary journals internationally, and anthologized in such books as Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday), Only Light Can Do That (Rattling Wall/PEN Center USA), Monster Verse—Human and Inhuman Poems (Knopf/Everyman), Making Up—Poems of Beauty, Reconciliation, & Invention (Picture Show Press), and the forthcoming Cold Floors (of Unkindness). The flash fiction book, California Continuum Vol. One, he co-authored with John Brantingham. Individual fiction pieces appear in LA Fiction Anthology: Southland Stories by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press) and Flash Fiction Journal — Two. His essays and reviews have been widely published as well, including in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Jeffers Studies, Explorations in English Studies, Teaching Composition with Literature, and the book John Fante: A Critical Gathering. Grant recently penned the liner notes to the latest Los Lobos album, Llegó Navidad, and he wrote and produced JOYRIDE: Friends Take the Wheel (entered for a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album). As a voice actor, Grant contributed the part of Stanley Hohner for the audiobook version of Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel (Penguin/ Random House) by George Saunders. That recording won the 2018 Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year. He is currently Full Professor at LCAD and poetry editor for Chiron Review.