Cynthia Linville’s poems blend images and personal story to create pieces that stay in the reader’s mind.
When the narrator of one of the poems encounters a lover from long ago, the conversation’s real, the setting is real:

"Yeah, I heard." And now
over greasy bacon and sticky
orange juice, no more
guilt.

The poet weaves detail and commentary together deftly in Nevermore, again as the narrator reflects on an acquaintance from the past:

Pasts like ours (filled with wooden crosses
and beatings in schoolhouses)
require a greater escape velocity
than other pasts do.

Cynthia Linville teaches English at California State University, Sacramento and serves as poetry editor of Poetry Now and managing editor of Convergence: an online journal and poetry and art (www.convergence-journal.com). She hosts the Second Friday Poetry Reading and her poetry has recently appeared in The Sacramento News and Review, The Sacramento Bee, Medusa’s Kitchen, and The Rattlesnake Review, Song of the San Joaquin, and WTF.

Check out the Convergence online journal:  www.convergence-journal.com 

Here are three poems by Cynthia Linville

Omens

walking under a ladder
stepping on a crack
an owl looking in your window
your lover's ex coming back

stabbing yarn with two needles
spilling pepper or salt
letting milk boil over
not admitting fault

cutting your nails on a Friday
opening an umbrella in the house
seeing a crow in a dream
telling a friend your doubts

getting out of bed with your left foot
a rooster crowing at noon
13 sitting down at table
a total eclipse of the moon

leaving a rocking chair rocking
giving a lover a knife
saying goodbye on a bridge
dreaming of those gone from life

a mirror or condom breaking
a dog howling after dark
a broken clock that starts chiming
nursing a broken heart

Nevermore
(after Nevermore, O Tahiti by Paul Gauguin)

Staring off into the joy-suffused light
wearing your hair in long dark braids
you could have stepped out of a Gauguin painting
instead of my past –
26 years since the end of high school.

I disagree when you say,
“We are all refugees from the past.”
Pasts like ours (filled with wooden crosses
and beatings in schoolhouses)
require a greater escape velocity
than other pasts do. You nod

the sorrow in your eyes so deep
I lean in for a closer look
and see myself mirrored there
in this crazy light.
Your pupils open wider and wider
spilling into the deep brown of your irises
pulling me in.

Here you are on a Sunday morning

(after all these years)
eating pancakes at Carrows;
you whom I almost married
(the evidence must still exist somewhere:
bridesmaids dresses hanging in closets, cake
order, ring style, sanctuary reservations)

forcing remembrance
of the way-back-then-high-school me
when I wore my hair straight and brown, and
wore nylons, heels and lots of mascara;
when you and I held hands in church every Sunday and
rode around in your '68 (or was it a '67) blue
Mustang (1BADMTG), my name painted on the door.

forcing remembrance
of two Senior Ball portraits
each identical except for the embracing couples:
one of you and me,
one of him and her. He and I were in white
and would have looked so nice together,
whereas you and I almost clashed.
I remember wanting way-back-then to paste
he and I together into one photo
and throw you away. Funny how, even before the Ball,

he always wore white
in my mind, and eventually did rescue me
in his dirty yellow Pinto with the dented door
(I had to climb in through the window).
And here I am now, almost seven years later, eating my eggs.
You and I sidelong glance each other,
just sit, letting the tension build.

My hair is short and red now,
and I'm wearing comfortable black
(on my way to a backstage theatre job).
And he (whom I left you for all those years ago)
is here with me. You
(furniture store manager) still look the same,
and you sit with your blond Barbi doll wife and in-laws--
all wearing pastels, fresh from church.

After I've finished mopping up my egg yolks with english muffin,
I walk towards you; he leaves to pay the bill.
Forced smiles and hello-how-are-you-how've-you-been's:
then, "I married him last December."
And you, "Yeah, I heard." And now
over greasy bacon and sticky
orange juice, no more
guilt. And I leave you,
again.