Elaine Mintzer

Elaine Mintzer lives in Los Angeles. Her work has been published on Moontide Press poet-of-the-month page, Cultural Weekly, MacQueen’s Quinterly (nominated for Best of the Net), Beloit Poetry Review, Panoplyzine, Slipstream Press, Silver Birch Press, Gyroscope Review, Last Call, Chinaski, Lummox, and Shiela-Na-Gig. Elaine’s first collection was Natural Selections (Bombshelter Press 2005).

Water Remembers

          I’ve read that water remembers the turmoil at the bend, the taste of silt,
the molecular structure of acacia leaves and pine needles that fall

          and ride the stream to the ocean.
I like to think I’m part of that river moving along with my friends,

          my husband, and my children. My parents have gone ahead.
My sister before them. One unborn.

          We flow from the waters of the river where my grandmother,
on her knees, washed laundry against the rocks like the mothers before her—

          the sheets stained with sex and sweat,
the afterbirth and afterdeath.

          Years ago, upstream, it was late summer at the LA Zoo.
Seals splashed in green pools as oak leaves scurried on the asphalt.

          Cousins, uncles, and children lined up to say cheese to Dad’s camera.
Here, take the baby, my sister said before diving in

          to a future that didn’t include her. What is in the water shapes the water.
I want to drink from that river. I want to be drunk with it.

Reverberations

They promised us that God lived in the sound
so there we sat, cross-legged on the floor
in a temple of incredible resonance,
chanting in Sanskrit.

Cross-legged on the floor,
accompanied by gongs and a hundred other voices
we chanted in Sanskrit,
feeling part of the cloth of the universe,

accompanied by gongs, by a hundred other voices,
one of them a man who’d been a cantor.
Feeling like a single thread in this cloth of a universe,
he’d lost himself in a drug dream.

The man who’d been a cantor
mangled a limb searching for God.
He’d lost himself in a drug dream,
carried down the I-10 in a Ford Falcon,

mangled a limb racing to find God
while the Doors sang Break on Through,
flying down the I-10 in a Ford Falcon,
joining the gulls by the breakers on the beach.

As the Doors sang Break on Through
the last of the surfers caught the last of the waves
to join the gulls by the breakers on the beach.
Night engulfed us all.

And there we sat, one by the next
in a temple of incredible resonance,
chanting in Sanskrit
because they’d promised me God lives in the sound.