Gabrielle Myers, M.A. ’08, explores the human experience in her new book of poetry.
Points in the Network (Finishing Line Press, 2025), her third poetry book, takes on complex feelings while also looking at social injustice, homelessness and more.
Myers is a professor of English at San Joaquin Delta College, teaching creative writing, composition and literature. With her colleagues, she recently developed a Certificate of Achievement in Creative Writing, which includes the course “Introduction to Publishing and Editing.”
Myers will do a reading at the Sacramento Poetry Center at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 24. She will also read from her book at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis on Jan. 15.
Here, Myers shares three poems from the new book and what inspired them.
To the Homeless Man Asleep Across the Street
What tenderness each curl brings,
what thoughts of a baby’s head
slick with afterbirth, just formed.
His bare arm around his head, hands withered by sun, street smudge,
days on the sidewalk and grass strip.
Dirt digs into his nails.
His jeans gather to commas,
his eye lids, soft wrinkles thinning
to slits— pure lenses.
His ears, burned with sun, sunken by hate slurs, spin
transformation, foot fall’s
promise, sun’s red rise.
Background: This poem asks what we would see if we approached everything in our gaze with loving appreciation. I wrote this poem while living in Midtown Sacramento during an afternoon in April. I looked out my window and saw the homeless man I describe in the poem. I wanted to infuse my descriptions of a person many would be critical of or turn away from with a steadfast love. This poem turns the shadow-side or vilified one into something praised and appreciated
Stretch In Ascension
Autumn’s wind moves smoke away,
Clears soot on a lilac’s broad leaf,
Blows in breaths we take
As if we’d been held under water for too long
Only for our buoyancy to propel us forward
Into air’s healing capacity.
Woodpeckers coast from pine to pine,
Make quick work of acorns,
Their wings small machines pumping into winter’s dance,
Their beaks hammers set to make sustenance
Carry them forward for spring’s food promise.
We make plans again, firm in our insistence
That what we sowed will nourish us,
Will bring us more into each other
Without losing our center.
Each acorn, its hull and husk edge burned,
Sets to tunnel into our field, root down
With microbes, take all nutrients
Through its incipient body to rain
Tall over grasses, stretch us and itself
In ascension, catch potential.
Background: Once devastation has stopped, a sudden clarity can emerge and allow us to see previously unrealized potential. The poem weaves two threads, one of a relationship that has almost met destruction only to be given a second life, and the literal clearing of smoke that had enclosed the valley and foothills for close to two weeks. I wrote this poem as I was living outside of Mountain Ranch, a foothill area destroyed by the Butte Fire. Rather than loss and destruction, in both the relationship and fire-torn areas I saw a limitless potential: how green grass grows beneath charred pine limbs, how some acorns and seedpods need fire to release their seeds, how we can reframe destruction into a chance to redefine ourselves and our desires.
Be Not Afraid
As a little girl in my bed in our suburban Maryland home, airplanes flying over our roof, their rumble and shingle shake, their boom through tulip poplar and bamboo forests, terrified me. Sound thrumming through the quiet 30 degrees, cloudy with no snow nights, lifted the ‘me’ up out of my body—this little girl’s small feet blistered from running cross country for the Catholic Youth Organization, her hair that always got so tangled every night from tossing and turning, the burning in her belly from acid, stress, constant hunger, the blue down comforter held over her brown curls.
There is no me…well, there is because I am here, but fear and reality of someday not existing made me shake myself awake and turn on my side and pray to God to not let me die. I never want to stop existing. I never want to cease. Maybe it was growing up during the Cold War just a few miles from the DC border where talks of Three Mile Island and nuclear war filled dinner tables and classroom discussions.
Maybe it was being a latchkey kid with parents who left before 7 am and got home just after 7 pm, the stories of little girls stolen and brutalized and raped before they were thrown off to the side of some two-lane highway near Gaithersburg.
Maybe it was Marsha and Cindy, the two girls I went to junior high with who killed themselves to go meet Satan.
The newspapers must have had it wrong, they said it was the Slayer and thrash metal that told crazy curly haired and heavy eye-lined Marsha to take Cindy’s father’s gun and shoot Cindy through the head, then turn the gun on her own mouth and pull.
How does one do that on a picnic table in Rock Creek Park’s outer edge? I loved Slayer, headbanged to South of Heaven, and knew the papers were wrong.
Why would one ever want to end; why would one ever want to bring it on, the emptiness, quiet, ceasing?
Even now, with benign nodules in my lungs and thyroid that I watch like a pilot watches her radar navigation and compass, the airplane noise fear makes me turn over in bed, curl, bury my head in comforter and pillow, touch my boyfriend’s warm bare body with my palm—our house is no shield, no comfort from the inevitable.
Background: At the time of writing this prose poem, I had been diagnosed with thyroid and lungs nodules, all benign, but the diagnosis filled me with fear and realization of my own mortality. I have known several people in my life who have tried to kill themselves and who have, but the idea remains foreign to me. Why would one ever want to end, especially when it could just mean silence and nothingness? In the poem, I recount the first suicide I was exposed to, how the stories we heard didn’t add up, which in my mind connects to the idea that the stories we tell ourselves about others’ “why” — why they decide to kill themselves or live, are just stories that most likely evade the truth. Every suicide I have been exposed to makes me want to grip firmer to life and never tire of its mystery and allure. Perhaps I haven’t suffered enough yet, but I can’t imagine not wanting to live, live, live.
Some poems need more context and space to deliver their main thrust, and the prose poem style allowed me to communicate what I needed to in the poem while simultaneously adopting a more casual narrative tone.