Casey FitzSimons
Casey FitzSimons is a frequent reader at San Francisco Bay Area venues. Her poems have appeared in print and online in Massachusetts Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Midwest Quarterly, Newport Review, Mezzo Cammin, and others. She has placed first in poetry at Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and Ina Coolbrith Circle, second at the Soul-making Keats Sonnet Competition and the Maggi H. Meyer Contest sponsored by Bay Area Poets Coalition, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has published 16 chapbooks, most recently More Than I Can Stand to Know (2018) and Listening for Prophecies (2019). Casey taught art in San Francisco for many years. Her reviews of Bay Area exhibitions frequently appeared in Artweek, and her studio drawing book, Serious Drawing, was published by Prentice Hall. She has a master’s degree in Fine Arts from San José State University.
A dog in the fog,
you have circled
down, lain down in the fatigue
you’ve had as long as you can remember.
You lie curled, instinctively guarding
your body’s warmth and I approach
and wrap myself around you from behind. That way
you can dwell on your innermost thoughts and I
have your back.
True Facts
Even if the sandpiper and its bobbing, three-toed
march on wet sand at low tide survives
the human-caused holocene extinction, it won’t
survive the death of the yellow dwarf star
that is our sun. Hardy as the species
Scolopacidae is, some billions of years from now
before the sun has exhausted its hydrogen, becoming
a red giant, losing its mass to the planetary nebula, compressing
its helium to carbon atoms and then to diamonds, the sandpiper too
will be gone.