Eloise Klein Healy

Eloise Klein Healy Poems

for Colleen

The cliff above where we stand is crumbling
and up on the Palisades
the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt.
...

for Sappho

Let my music be found wanting
in comparison
to yours (as it must)
...

and on the waves in turmoil
in the harbor
gulls floated
like pieces of paper
...

Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don't know about you.
...

Turning your back, you button your blouse. That's new.
You redirect the conversation. A man
has entered it. Your therapist has given you
...

My father's dying
resembles nothing so much
as a small village
building itself
...

Eloise Klein Healy Biography

Born in El Paso, Texas, Eloise Klein Healy grew up in rural Iowa. Healy's crisp, image- and narrative-driven poems often explore community, sexuality, and the nature of home. On the radio program Writers on Writing, Healy discussed her work’s attention to “the influence of place on people.” Addressing the role of the open-air California landscape and the details of daily life that often ground her poems, Healy noted, “The way you are in the world is also the way you are in your head.” Healy has published numerous collections of poetry, including The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho (2007); Passing (2002), a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize; and Artemis in Echo Park (1991), which was also nominated for the Lambda Book Award. As an editor, Healy is also active in the world of small-press publishing. She co-founded ECO-ARTS, a venture combining ecotourism and the arts, and in 2006 established Arktoi Books, an imprint with Red Hen Press specializing in the work of lesbian writers. She was the Grand Prize winner of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival Competition, and other honors include grants from the California Arts Council and the City of Los Angeles, residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Dorland Mountain Colony, and several Pushcart Prize nominations. Healy’s work has been featured in many anthologies, including The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (2001), Another City: Writing from Los Angeles (2001), and The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place (1999). Healy has taught at California State University Northridge, where she directed the Women’s Studies Program, and at the Feminist Studio Workshop in the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She was the founding chair of the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she won the inaugural Horace Mann Award. In 2012, Healy was appointed Los Angeles’s first poet laureate by mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. She lives in California.)

The Best Poem Of Eloise Klein Healy

The Beach at Sunset

for Colleen

The cliff above where we stand is crumbling
and up on the Palisades
the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt.

Art Deco palm trees sway their hula skirts
in perfect unison
against a backdrop of gorgeous blue,

and for you I would try it,
though I have always forbidden myself to write
poems about the beach at sunset.

All the clichés for it sputter
like the first generation of neon,
and what attracts me anyway

are these four species of gulls we've identified,
their bodies turned into the wind,
and not one of them aware of their silly beauty.

I'm the one awash in pastels
and hoping to salvage the day, finally turning away
from the last light on the western shore

and the steady whoosh of waves driving in,
drumming insistently like the undeniable data
of the cancer in your breast.

We walk back to the car
and take the top down for the ride home
through the early mist.

No matter what else is happening,
this is California. You'll have your cancer
at freeway speeds. I'll drive and park

and drive at park. The hospital
when I arrive to visit will be catching
the last rays of the sun, glinting

like an architectural miracle realized.
I realize a miracle is what you need—
a grain of sand, a perfect world

where you live beyond the facts
of what your body has given you
as the first taste of death.

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