Storyteller of the Week

Cynthia Anderson

  

 Cynthia Anderson

Cynthia Anderson has published 12 poetry collections including Waking Life, Now Voyager, Route, The Missing Peace and most recently Arrival (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023) and Full Circle (Cholla Needles Press, 2023.)  She has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
She makes her home in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. She has been a poet and resident of California for over 40 years. Cynthia writes about the natural world and her family history.

Her haiku, senryu, cherita, tanka, and other short form poems have appeared in Frogpond, Failed Haiku, Prune Juice, Haiku in Action, Haiku Dialogue, Frameless Sky, The Heron's Nest, Cold Moon Journal, Wales Haiku Journal, MacQueen's Quinterly, the cherita, Moonbathing, Ribbons, and others.
Her traditional poems appear in Verse Virtual, Sheila-Na-Gig, Cholla Needles, Silver Birch Press, and Writing in a Women's Voice.

Cynthia is co-editor of the anthology, A Bird Black as the Sun, California Poets on Crows and Ravens, described by Jane Hirschfield as "a book whose heights, swoops, visions, and versatile multiplicities of flight-path are worthy of the trickster-bird celebrated in its pages."  

Cynthia's poems have appeared in many anthologies, among them: San Bernardino Singing (Inlandia Books, 2020), California Fire & Water (Story Street Press, 2020), Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018), Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology (Split Rock Review, 2018), Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017) and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016). 

To browse her website: www.cynthiaandersonpoet.com

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

I’ve been a fan of Cynthia Anderson for many years before we connected in August 2020 on Verse-Virtual and found we had a lot in common. We both live in the desert among the wildlife, both write about the desert, wildlife, our families, women’s issues and we are both storytellers. I was drawn to Cynthia’s poetry because she weaves tale about real life so honestly and directly and authentic that you believe they happened to her even if they are fiction. Her stories are powerful and have an ironic twist.

I am proud to publish these poems that show her signature storytelling style.

The Wife

It’s always the same fight,
and it ends the same way—
I slam the door, jangle my keys,
mumble, No more. I’m done.

I drive fast and far, fly down
bumpy dirt roads, scrape bottom.
Turn off lights and engine,
tell the stars, I’ll never...

I sleep till coyotes howl
then open the door and almost
step on a stinkbug or kangaroo rat.
That’s that. I head back to

my soaps and chores. My kids
don’t show up—why would they?
To watch him on another bender
while I hide in the bedroom?

Ann Landers used to ask, Are you
better off with him, or without him?
I know the answer to that one.
That’s why the next time,

I make sure. I take my pills
with me—all of them. He waits
three days to call the cops, says
She always came home before.

You might think I’m a loser—
but I called his bluff and
made him sweat. So I win.
In my heaven,

there’s no creosote—
only evergreens,
meadows, waterfalls.
I’ll never go home.


Sheets

My mother asks if I want
the old copper tub
that her mother used
to boil sheets.

Wash day was Monday.
The tub sat on the stove,
covering two burners,
its load bubbling.

Nana would wrap
the sheets on a stick,
lift them to the washer,
hang them on the line
behind her rose garden.

My mother says,
It was a different time.
The sheets had to be white,
and they were white.

I imagine
how fresh they smelled,
how clean they felt,
how their brightness
made the neighbors blink—

and I say yes,
though I’m not sure
where to keep
this piece of the past.

Discolored but intact,
down to the lid
and three smooth
wooden handles,

the tub ends up
by the fireplace,
ready to hold logs
for winter.



The I-10
    —San Bernardino County

Born in 1897, a San Bernardino native son,
my grandfather lived to be 100. Late in life,
when we would take him out for a drive,
he would point to some shopping mall
off the I-10 and say,
We used to hunt rabbits there.

When he retired from title insurance,
he farmed in Cherry Valley, fruit trees
and eggs. Later, in Yucaipa, he cared for
my grandmother, who lingered two decades
after a crippling stroke—with a will to live
she learned as a child in Randsburg,
where her father worked for the mines.

Time and again, I would head down the coast,
pick up the I-10 in Santa Monica, barrel straight
through L.A.’s polluted heart to the hinterlands,
find my way to the Yucaipa house by rote,
gripping the wheel as I ran the gauntlet,
breathing a sigh of relief at the exit.

Then Riverside, a convalescent hospital
on Magnolia Drive. My grandfather recalled
when the stately palms were planted,
Sunday drives before the first world war.
He joined my grandmother at Desert Lawn,
hardly a resting place—the I-10 a noisy witness
to the end of their lives and the world they knew.


Bird Woman of Wonder Valley

Her morning ritual begins with breath—
the steady rise and fall of her chest,

then a flutter of eyes as the eastern
sky reddens. Naked, she descends

from her rooftop bed to the wild
ground of her oasis—a stand

of palm, tamarisk, and mesquite
she anoints with water too brackish

for drinking. She opens a bin and
scoops seeds, scatters them wide

for sparrows who nest in her trees,
who sing all day unless a hawk

scares them to silence. Years ago,
she stopped trying to be the right bird,

took refuge among the creosote,
liked being alone so much

she removed the passenger seat
from her truck. Her favorite time

of day is dusk, when quail shoot
up to the treetops, disturbing doves

already settled behind dry, rustling
fronds. In starlight, she dreams

of gold talons, hears wingbeats
that mimic her heart.

 
Queen of the Mist

A Civil War widow at 25, her infant son dead,
Annie Edson Taylor faced the rest of her life

with gusto. She crossed the continent eight times,
became a dance instructor, took off with a friend

for Mexico—the details can only be imagined,
since she was a good Episcopalian and confessed

no sins—thank God, a substantial inheritance
bridged the gap between expenses and income.

She spared no cost at any juncture—and so,
near her 63rd birthday, found herself penniless,

lodged in a boarding house, relying on the charity
of relatives who begrudged every dime. Then

kismet struck like a 200-pound anvil—
why not be the first to ride Niagara Falls

in a barrel? Of course, she would survive,
make a fortune on autographs and memorabilia,

travel the world again, heave ho! Full of bravado,
she hired a promoter, had the best barrel made,

and did it—though the physical shock shook her
to the core. Nobody ought ever to do that again,

she claimed. In a photo of her sitting alone at a table,
waiting for adoring hordes to shower her with gold,

she looks grim. Her manager stole her barrel.
She spent twenty more years a pauper before

meeting her maker. If not for her desperate act,
she would be entirely forgotten—

just another woman who ran out of options,
who was willing to die if she could not live

in the style to which she was accustomed.

Publishing Credits: The Wife, Writing in a Woman’s Voice; Sheets. Footnote 3: A Literary Journal of History, 2020, Alternating Current Press; The 1-10, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, 2011; Bird Woman of Wonder Valley, Mojave River Review Vol. 2, No. 1, 2016 and Queen of the Mist, Footnote 2: A Literary Journal of History, 2019, Alternating Current Press.