• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

VoiceCatcher

support • inspire • empower

header-right

Main navigation

  • Our Team
  • About
    • Our Board
    • Our Story
  • Donate
  • Submissions
  • January 27, 2021
  • Fall 2019
  • Contents
  • Prose
    • Plants in a Milk Crate
    • Love and Flooding in Kings Canyon
    • How to Survive a Pregnancy Loss
  • Poetry
    • child, let’s listen to the thunder
    • She Loses Me in Distances
    • umami
    • Aunty Ruby’s Eyes
    • Apparently the Insurance Company Needs a Diagnostic Code
    • Weeds in the Rain
    • An Allegory of Desire
    • A Lover’s Eyes
    • Puerto Escondido, 1978
    • the play of licorice on
    • To Be a Woman Alone
    • The Girl Who Raised Fantail Pigeons
    • Advisory
    • Open Carry
    • but if you go too soon
    • Wail
    • Night Journey
  • Art
    • Afterglow
    • Heat Wave
    • Dusty Rose
    • Wifebeater Washer Unplugged
    • Banana Split
    • Suburban Dog
    • House
    • Big Sun
    • Favorite Things
  • Young Voices
    • Carmen
    • Racing Heart
    • god’s country

Advisory

Posted on 12.13.19 by Alison Cantrell

Poetry by Delia Garigan

June on the Oregon Coast and I sleep
uneasy in the family tent, one ear cocked
cognizant of the steady pulsing threat
in the nightlong breaking waves
Their pounding promise

is worry—or worse—
pouring over the precipice—is
a world smashed in underwater silence
(thanks to a tsunami evacuation route
of essential nonexistence)

An hour before dawn the storm moves in—
contrast yesterday’s windless warmth
mosquito swarms and idle kites
to this lashing wet that slings our tent
in rapid tempo, both ways and back

As growing daylight diffuses in
both adults are bracing, arms outstretched
against sideways walls that flap and heave
While somehow the kids still sleep
through the roar and torrent

with puddles flooding up around us
Then the oldest bolts upright
like a four-year-old at five a.m.
takes it in—the hurl and pitch
of a fabric home lifting off around him

Joy radiates across his face; he cries
“This weather is perfect for flying the kite!”


Growing up on a small farm, Delia Garigan assumed animals could understand her words. Later, she aspired to time travel but ended up with a degree in neuroscience instead. After a period of intensive Zen study, she grew her hair out and had a family. As a respite from the consuming work of wrangling her descendants, Delia also enjoys hammering jewelry, eating Khmer food, and inhaling the blackberry scent that pervades Oregon’s deciduous forests.

Reader Interactions

sidebar

Blog Sidebar

Don't miss out!

Current
IssueRead Now
Previous
IssuesRead Now

Announcements

Mar 12

Notes from the President

Sep 19

Conversations with Writers & 9 Bridges Present Suzanne Sigafoos

Sep 13

New Poetry Collection from Carolyn Martin

Portland, Oregon

Site by Edee Lemonier

VoiceCatcher, All Rights Reserved