Cynthia White is a poet based in Santa Cruz, California. Her poems have appeared in Adroit, Massachusetts Review, ZYZZYVA, Southern Poetry Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and Plume among others. Her work can be found in numerous anthologies, including leaning toward light: Poems for gardens and the hands that tend them from Storey Press.

She was a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. Her poem “She Said Stop Here” was recently included in the preface to “Alma Mater” by London playwright Kendall Feaver. Cynthia is a screener for Red Wheelbarrow’s annual poetry prize.

Selected works

Listen

Radar

A mockingbird chick weighs less than your eye,
but hark to the rising squeals beyond the double pane—
like bagpipes, like trains, like Tuvans
hitting two pitches at once, only desperate.
I go outside, and deep in my abelia,
spy the yellow funnels of mouths
unhinged to an impossible angle.
In the novel I just finished, the narrator
takes up the tangled roots of the word list,
from Old English lystan,
“to cause pleasure or desire, provoke longing.”
Every few minutes, a parent flies to the nest
with a beetle or a worm. I thought I’d never
crave that pleasure again. The beck, the call,
keeping the hatched from death. My first
was born disconsolate. Fussy, my mother said.
I could have driven away to another city, traveled
to a distant country. I could have left the planet.
But oh, those screams.

Cosmogenesis

MER - Motherhood, Literature, & Art

You could start a brand-new planet with all the things I haven’t saved:
planet of rain forests rich in gorillas, of bees, lady slippers, my mother
minus the gin. Planet of every quaking mouse and bird the cat ate. Planet
of my estrogen, my fabulous breasts. Ribboned love letters and the bridge
that was my marriage. Planet smelling of my nurslings, something unnamable
that poured from their pores like manna. Planet bright with sex and death:
spring peepers, big-bellied bush crickets, thrush storming the feeder. A place
of keener silences. Inkier skies. And god only knows how much money.
How many sales slips, shopping lists, ticket stubs, business cards,
take-out cookie prophecies; ephemera as avalanche. That blue green orb
where friends return my calls, where I bike the gone streets
of childhood, hundred-year-old oaks touching overhead.
Planet of my dreams where no one and nothing suffers,
or creates suffering. Planet of my illusions, robust as oxen.

Anniversary

The Adroit Journal

I give my attacker a mustache, take it away. I give him
outsized hands, then feet. I put him in the dock. Is he looking
my direction? Bowing his head? How can I tell you? I’ve lost
the face. You’ll want details. If I gave him a knife, pressed
his thumb to the switch. If it was summer, my body
in tee shirt and shorts, blackberries crowding the road.
If I allow you my fear, my blood, my luck. I lived. How
will you tell the story? I’m shackling the tremendous
hands, leading him back to the dock. He stands,
big and orange, sweating in that jumpsuit. He’ll stand there
as long as it takes.

Publications

Societal attempts to control female sexuality have always fascinated me. Technological advances (the bicycle, the automobile, the telephone) often provoked dire warnings about the downfall of Woman. While the claims seem outright bizarre, even laughable, at their heart lies a grain of truth…

—From the Tahoma Literary Review