Do You Believe In Magic Mama?
The weather in Los Angeles, a poem
Do you believe in magic Mama? My daughter keeps asking me.
A blister forming on the back of my heel.
I become desperate for good news.
Watching a cloud from fire rise again above the mountains.
My hands dry and cracking.
If we had not been in drought, if there had not been wind - my husband says into the night, trying to right my heart, which lurches from one side to the other in my chest, drunk off fear for the future. Touching our cabbages covered in ash and our mint. The wind having pulled the roof of the green house apart. California is my love, I think. California, California, California, it has always been the promise land. Oranges, water, girls, gold.
When morning arrives, in motherhood, there is laundry to do. Praying for rain, the morning opening dark, and then the sun breaking out clear skies as far as the eye can see and beyond. All the ash that is left, tingles when you accidentally touch it in our yard, brushing past to get to the car, or to the washer and dryer. And no matter what, I am always losing a sock’s pair.
In one of our favorite beach towns just north of Los Angeles, we collect stones with holes in them. For incense. For rings. As reminders, to stack against the flat stones my husband found in Ventura when we were apart, the rocks from the Grand Canyon, the shells we brought back from Italy, all in a beautiful glass bowl. When I dream it is still of a flood. Stuffing myself with mint and chocolate candy. I dream of trees I have never seen, draped in moss, I dream of fireflies and heat. Sometimes, I dream I am not a mother. And before the fire, there were things I had wanted to change. A reordering of my world, both internal and external. My brain seemingly (like so many) gone to rot. It is brave, several friends have told me, to be thinking about the climate. About what will be lost. What has already been lost. So many people are hurting everywhere.
And then this morning, the soft pat of rain, the snow catching the morning light in the mountains to the north of us. Tossing almost sleepless through the night.