Poems by Wren Tuatha

Bear Vigil

by Wren Tuatha

From Canary Summer 2020

Wren Tuatha is a climate refugee, having escaped the ongoing fires of California for the Cayuga watershed of the New York Finger Lakes.

coming around
in daylight
this
is not
normal
Tonka my Akbash
leaping the fence
my sentinel my
signal fire
my sheriff
escorting the bear
to BML borderland
this
is not
normal
that dog floods
my heart
and steels it
in the same beat
he does what needs
doing what times
are these my mountain
remade in wildfire
white nationalists
coming around
in daylight the bear
wants a goat wants
more than land
can give the bear
what times
are these
my own loaded hunger
to know the peace
on the other side
of the thing
that needs
doing

© Wren Tuatha

Mandy Finds Her Place

by Wren Tuatha

From Canary Summer 2023

surveys a plot on her land—
her place in the burn where she
can hammock her soul again;
her place she now marks
with a green wicker chair.

Mandy can name grasses ponding
her place beneath cauterized scrub oak.
Her place had goats and working dogs,
most lost that day, with tribes of trees
and her house on Yankee Hill.
Her place and all of us in the forge.

I want to tell her story,
how Mandy is made of iron.
Last year, on a stony dirt road
at her place, half in
and half out of her truck
when the brakes gave up,
Mandy went with it,
slow motion, into the gulch,
dogs thrown around the cab.
Dogs ran. She crawled
to find help, broken
like a shoveled snake.

At home she grew new bones,
her place a slope for goats.
Never heard her scream.
Mandy at the forge.

From her place
she still looks for Isis,
her favorite Akbash dog,
missing since the fire.
Her place germinating
wicker, her place
a flagpole for ghosts.

First published in San Pedro River Review.

© Wren Tuatha

Tupelo Coyote

by Wren Tuatha

From Canary Summer 2017

We were tracing Jack’s Creek
where the woods abducts it from the rolling
hills of dairy cows and tobacco,
I on the asphalt, you behind the tupelos.
You stalked me like a fan
afraid to ask for my autograph,

those alien eyes,
calculating,
measuring my marrow
bend after turn, always
thirty paces aside.

Now you trot out in the farmlands,
legs like tobacco sticks, mapping the median line.
I am roadside, reading.
You are storybook real.
I speak to you, familiar,
as if you are the family dog.
Your answer is a glare-beam
that rips me, rights me.

You put me in the landscape,
that’s all.

© Wren Tuatha

Wearing California

by Wren Tuatha

From Canary Spring 2019

Comes the rainy season in drought times
and Tonka the Akbash is wearing California.

The red pine dirt, tempera paint, would
wash to white if you could catch him.

In spring the hose water will be warm
and Tonka will be coaxed. Thin, woken

bears will show up behind the manzanitas.
Experts will measure water levels.

Neighbors will jaw on whether
the snowcap was enough, brown yard

against green one, watered on the sly.
A shopkeeper’s spraying homeless off her stoop.

NorCal folks roll tremors of resentment
as water is syphoned down slope to L.A.,

hot tubs or desert farming, blame sprawl,
blame other. And Nestle trucks roll east.

First published in The Birds We Piled Loosely.