by Bill Ratner
She is broken now, in half
by the Santa Ana Winds.
Yellow barricade tape surrounds her.
She is sideways, like a capsized ship.
Yet she blooms,
her crown like a jungle lioness
her leaves greener than good health,
her branches black as carbon.
I thought the city would come and cut her up,
cart her away as nurse logs that might provide
new life for seedlings to grow.
But she is fully dressed.
She wears my mother’s gold paste earrings and pearls,
when new winds blow she sounds like the ocean,
I dance to her, I marvel what she might know about me.
I’m never sad around her.
She talks with grandmother moon.
She can hear me sing.
Bill Ratner is a voice actor and author of poetry collections Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake (Slow Lightning Lit, 2024,) Fear of Fish (Alien Buddha Press, 2021,) To Decorate a Casket (Finishing Line Press, 2021,) Best of the Net Poetry Nominee 2023 (Lascaux Review,) and 9-time winner of the Moth StorySLAM. His writing appears in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press,) Missouri Review (audio,) and other journals. billratner.com/author • @billratner
Emerge Literary Journal 