Now available, Lisa's new collection of poetry, the tinydetails.
Click HERE to be taken to the bookstore for purchase options and preview.
Below are selected poems from the volume: the tinydetails
Nepenthe
Just before they uncap the needle, I fidget with the filmy hairnet and tug at thin gown strings, then warn the anesthesiologist I am a cheap date. One drop and I’m yours; don’t juice me up until you slip me onto the surgical table. I’ll sing, pretend I’m a mermaid, ask you for sushi, and reveal my bank codes as I drift, so take notes. Sometimes they laugh, unused to patients with gallows humor poking fun as a surgeon chooses the blade best for flesh or bone. Some don’t believe me and inject just the one to calm you first, then go wide-eyed as I slip off the face of a cliff with a single blink. I love the ones who lean in to really look at me, the ones who trust that when a woman speaks, she might know her mind. They say, done this a lot, have you? And I nod. Once, I asked how many times I could be put under without frying my circuits, and the woman holding the dram assured me that there wasn’t a countdown clock where the buzzer at the end meant peace out. I’m still not sure. Each time I fight back up through the salty layers, moving from the trenches to sunlight zone where surging tides draw me swiftly back to shore, I wonder how long I can hang there in the darkness, body rent open along some seam, exposed, stilled but not dead, brain blindly floating. Each time they lay me down and fill me with forgetting, I lose fragments of myself. When I wake, my husband laughs in the recovery room as nurses recount tales I told while swimming up or down the benthic layers. One young trainee with an octopus tattoo on her tanned arm even scrawled on my release papers with a smiley face: Mermaid, let’s go get drinks and laugh some more. You sang as you swam. You sank, but didn’t die.
--Lisa Dowling ________________________ Ah, the joys and sorrows of anesthesia. I have been called a cheap date by a doc so many times that I love to pre-empt all the clinical questions with this tidy tidbit of info, and it never fails to get laughs from the staff. I was listening to a science podcast and they were describing what happens to the body in its suspended animation, and marveling at how we can pause time to go diving into the body. Then that led to the idea of mermaids, and that reminded me of the notes that some clinicians have left on my files over the years. I took a little creative license with this one, but had fun writing it, so there's that. Bless the ones that put us to sleep and wake us back up. May their hands never falter.
rooted
in the morning hours where time seems unlatched from liminal space, I awake briefly to find your leaves intertwined with mine. all night long we wave our branches independently in the small breeze, rocking in sleep with grey-lit clouds gliding over our canopies. the landscape breathes around us, plants open and close their pores to drink or sweat. the last of our energy is spent on making sugar as the sun closes its eyes and burns behind the earth’s back like a secret.
by day we stand tall, turn our faces to the sky -- aware of both the pests chewing their way in and the relief of releasing molecules out. at night our veins slow, dreams transpire and unfurl. those tiny filaments, blind beneath the soil, seek purchase in a world intent on knocking the tallest of us down. by the time the sun rises again, we are enmeshed underground, having found balance in each other, our roots still talking their strange language, our limbs still stroking their tips in slow communion.
--lisa dowling ------------------------------- Trees make frequent appearances in my poetry, sometimes as main characters, and sometimes as supporting cast, but always as key elements in the storyline. I grew up revering trees, from the Chinese elm of my childhood home in Cudahy, CA, to the massive camphor tree in my later home in Downey, CA, to the immense Torrey Pine in my current home in Costa Mesa, CA. Even the sycamore and ash trees that line the boundary of Reavilleen in Rosscarbery, Ireland, play a starring role in my psyche, as they frame the landscape of ocean and sky, giving the ringneck doves and magpies a place to roost. It's only fitting that this poem celebrates my husband and I as trees, each rooted in place and doing our own thing, but secretly enmeshed and holding each other strong beneath the surface.
To Toast the Missing Moon
One month after the lockdown began he watched her walk out her front door with a glass of wine and find the double yellow lines in the middle of the boulevard. The night air was warm, wind rising from the direction of the sea to slide down the street toward the hills. Sodium vapor streetlights winked against the lip of her glass and she stood for many minutes, looking one way and then the other; not a single car or human traveling either way. The city was stilled, people tensed on the edge of knowing and fear as they waited for the virus wave to wash over. She walked over reflective dots a few yards, her skirt swirling in the breeze, and just as he had decided to go out to see if she was ok, she lifted her glass to the sky, black-orange dome devoid of constellations, and she toasted the night. Startled, he reached for his glass, whiskey melting a single cube of ice, and from behind his window he toasted her back, though he wasn’t sure if her gesture was a fanfare or farewell, social reflex moved him to reflect the act. He wondered what she saw that he did not. No planes flew, no one scurried from work to home, nothing but coyotes and nightbirds moved among the shadows. In another time he would have stepped out, exchanged neighborly banter, complained gently about the surreal act of stopping everything. But her toast seemed like it may have been a prayer, the lifted glass a supplication rather than a blessing, and he drew the blinds to let her make her offering to the concrete and silent stars in peace.
--Lisa Dowling ------------------------------------------ This poem was culled from two different ideas I had, and a need to write from a different POV. A month into lockdown I was standing in the middle of our street drinking a glass of wine one evening, marveling at the lack of everything -- sounds, cars, people, stars. The natural rhythms of our life here in the metropolis were erased. I wondered what people were doing in their houses, in their countries, in their wonder and despair. As the weeks went on with little movement in the city, the raccoons and coyotes began to emerge and nature reasserted herself. I could see eyes reflected in the drainage channels edging the streets. The natural world surged forth when the humans stopped stomping, but still the stars remained behind the veil of light, and the moon was a long time in rising.
Say Their Names
At the end of the march they all stopped –hundreds of mostly white teens with fists raised in the air – and listened as a black peer relayed the last moments of a murdered man’s life. “Now we kneel,” he said, and with bodies perspiring, breathing hard from chanting and miles of walking, the crowd knelt down in the middle of the busy street, blue and red lights from cruisers looping in blazing midday sun. And because it was not just a protest, but also a pandemic, they arranged their bodies apart, took a knee as sweat ran down and drenched the masks covering mouths and noses, air thickly difficult to draw.
“Now we lay face down for nine minutes, the time the cops pinned him down until he died.” The crowd went down, black asphalt biting palms and knees, ache spreading before they were fully prone. The sea of white bodies accepted the burning from face to foot, their silence broken only by the young man next to me crying into the lenses of his glasses, tiny pools forming in the frames. At my other side, two girls in small summer clothes lay perfectly still, hands clasped behind their backs, legs and arms tattooed with melting tar.
Their streaked blond hair fanned out over a cardboard sign depicting the dead man’s face edged in dark hearts. “Say his name,” the young man called. From hundreds of faces pressed to the ground, a name bloomed black. “I can’t breathe,” the young man commanded, and the crowd repeated the death knell. Two young men filmed with phones the improbable scene: white bodies accepting black pain. Minutes ticked away. Silence grew. Cars idled as their occupants recorded the spectacle, watched behind air-conditioned windows as cops circled, shifting from foot to foot.
As the last seconds faded, from over the fence nearest the street, we heard a soft volley and return. Volley and return. The disbelieving crowd slowly understood. A pair of tennis players – oblivious to the wave of collective grief rolling by outside the court’s white walls – served and countered, running and reversing in their white shoes within the white fault lines. The game had begun blind, starting at love-love, but the world adjacent grieved in silence; masses of outraged bodies stayed pressed to the ground in pain, listening.
--Lisa Dowling --------------------------------------------------- The recent protests, riots, and marches in honor of the black lives matter movement in America speak to the heart of what's wrong with the world. There is a reason the movement is experiencing participation worldwide as people in each country take a keen look at how they treat the "other" in their communities. The recent killing of a black man (unarmed, facedown, handcuffed George Floyd) at the hands of white cops who kneeled on his back and neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds was one of the most recent insults against black bodies that began the call for justice for people of color persecuted by law enforcement. A student at my daughter's school organized this protest for young folks as a way to show solidarity with the movement. This scene near the end was a bizarre counterpoint to the solemnity of the march. It made me realize how there will always be some people blithely unaware of the suffering of others because they are comfy in their privileged bubbles.
Mooring Ropes
My heart is a boat with ropes tied tight to your mooring. All night I rise and fall with the swell of the sea under my hull, salt and oxygen dissolving into layers of foam as I rock, open to the bay, the stars, the sky. Without you I am tossed by tides and tempests, storms often of my own making rattle my shell. But you’re more than an anchor sitting in the silt beneath me, more than double assurances of knots and clips, metal loops catching and holding what keeps me still. You are the unmoving point, the fixed coordinate to which I always return after days of drifting on the lips of waves in search of meaning. From the start it was apparent we were incomplete without each other, a complement of entities that once seen together cannot be imagined apart. Think of the clichéd hand and glove, think of the knife without its fork, think of the goblet without the wine. When you caught and held me all those years ago as I was spiraling through the darkest waters, I realized you were the lodestar that would finally keep my heart pointed toward home.
--Lisa Dowling ------------------------------------- I've had the first lines for this poem sitting in my notes for a few years now, and its original title was "Of Mooring Ropes and Friends." However, when I went to write it this week I couldn't help but make it more about my husband than my friends, as he has been such a positive anchor for me over the years. When I got near the end of writing it, though, I realized that it applied just as much to my soulmate as it did my best friend, a woman who has buoyed me up more times than I can count over the past 27+ years. Friends like those are priceless -- those guides and stays and bulwarks who keep you in line and make you remember who you are and where you are supposed to be. The later lines that talk about cliche are actually echos from an original poem by Jacques Crickillon which was later parodied by Billy Collins. Pulling other poets' works into my poems is a sly way of making references to the poetic culture at large.
Prayer
Blessed are those who break our hearts. Those who first open a gash that leads to healing away from the source of pain. Blessed are those that mumble vows, lie, and mislead, for in their beds we first conceive the idea that another lover may save us from our illusions. Pray for those that present us with papers to sign, write confessions on the backs of photographs, let slip another name over a second bottle of wine. Exalt them. Lift them up. Crown them with the glory of the future seen through the blood of a temporary wound.
Praise the ones who intentionally tipped our baskets, spilled the riches to the ground. For without them today would not have two teacups full of warmth, bedrooms ringing with the laughter of children, and halls slanted with sunlight revealing to all who pass that the art hung upon the walls and the music rising from the living room speakers all sing in praise of the pain that kills so another life may be born out from the furrows of the first. Rejoice that there was one fearless seed beneath it all that found salvation in the rain.
--Lisa Dowling ----------------------------------------- This poem is meant to be read slowly, almost chanted like a prayer in church. By using many of the same words as a traditional prayer, it seeks to elevate betrayal to a holy spot in the consciousness. There is a deep sense of gratitude that comes in realizing the mistakes or omissions of the past have made you the person you are today. There is also a certain power that comes from seizing back control of the event by forgiving the aggressor rather than dwelling on the pain.
Gesture
At lunch and in the middle of a sentence my daughter reaches over to straighten
the pen in her father’s pocket, a tiny gesture, mindless, midstream a story. She still has fries
in the other hand, halfway to her mouth, and this complicated dance of adjustment
and feeding stops me mid-bite to glance sidelong at my husband’s face.
He registers the exchange through a half second pause as he reaches for his drink,
aware if he lets on how sweet this moment is, she will laugh it off and erase the wonder
of watching a child experiment with tenderness on the one man she expects to never hurt her.
So I see her future as a wife, shaping the fabric of her husband’s time, catching the loose ends
of what he cannot see and making them true. I see her children and all their frayed toys
and shoes, her deft touch making them whole. Later at home she flicks a string off his cuff
as she passes him in the kitchen and I catch myself marveling at the small movements
we learn to groom and care for one another -- the human culling of flakes and threads
and errant fur, the smoothing of space around bodies moving through a world slightly askew.
--Lisa Dowling ---------------------------------------------- For a while I thought I would never write poems about being a mother, as it all seemed too close, too emotional. But I find it's easy to write observational poems about my daughter's movements through the world. She loves her father (it's easy to do!) and I really enjoy watching them interact -- from her leaning into his side when they are gazing at the ocean, to him patting the springy curls on her head at night before bed. She is not an inherently "touchy" person, so to see her absentmindedly grooming another person is extra sweet as it shows how we are hardwired deep in our physiology to care for the members of our troupe.
given
a child sneezes in the other room and the mother gives her blessing – instinctively, reflexively, rather like the sneeze itself.
so many things should be given as such – uncounted, unnumbered. the heart, when startled, should reach toward love.
--Lisa Dowling ------------------------------------------------------- I had a stack of tiny poems, little thoughts scrawled on scraps of paper and receipts that I kept tucked my wallet for "one day" when I would write a real poem from those fragmented lines. While sifting through the pile one afternoon, I realized that they didn't all have to be epic poems; they could be little individual thoughts that were complete. I wrote this poem after blessing my daughter for a sneeze I heard from three rooms away. I wish we all could give blessings or forgiveness so easily. I wish it was our first reflex, rather than something we have to work at.