Georgia Jones-Davis grew up in northern New Mexico and Southern California.  She wrote and published poetry while a student at UCLA.  After a discouraging poetry workshop experience she spent more than twenty years avoiding poets and poetry. She worked as a literary journalist contributing to The Washington Post,  The Chicago Tribune, New York Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, New Mexico Magazine, Southwest Book Views and The San Francisco Chronicle.  She worked as a staff writer, editor and book reviewer for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and spent fourteen years as Assistant Book Editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review.  After leaving the news business, poetry, she says she "came back like a long, lost muddy dog."  Her work has appeared in Westwind, Brevities, The Bicycle Review, The California Quarterly, Sam Hamil's website Poets Against War, poeticdiversity and South Bank Poetry (London), among other publications. Davis served as a director on the board of the Valley Contemporary Poets that produces poetry readings and events and publishes an anthology; was honored as one of the six Newer Poets 2010 by the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, Beyond Baroque Literary Center and the Los Angeles Public Library ALOUD series. Her poem, "Emily at Auschwitz," was nominated for the anthology, Best on the Web 2010. Her chapbook, Blue Poodle, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011.

Three Poems from Blue Poodle

The Day Tumbles Away Like a Butterfly

The day tumbles away
like a butterfly
hard pears rest
in a stoneware bowl

trees sing
in the nervous November gusts
as the air shudders
in gaudy light

wind chimes
hold a breath               hesitate
then their jangled music

hold a breath               hesitate
while the pears
in the stoneware bowl
ripen

Apple Weather

I bundle up in the surprise of the San Fernando Valley cold,
drive to the grocery store in its loneliest hour,
after families trek home with stores for the week,

and the silent checkers eye the clocks in the Sunday evening gloom.
This is the last thing I feel like doing on a late, lazy afternoon, but I know
that there’s still a little fresh bread to be had and in the vegetable aisle

festive piles of small pumpkins, Carnival squash, and Delicata,
with their animal yellow and orange stripes,
odd-shaped petrified tigers, flowers from outer space,

crustacean plants determined to lasts forever within protective shells
that will not crumble in the savagery of the season’s pageant
the way pears and apples in the doom of crisp fragility wave goodbye
to their trees.

In the woodsy, smoky, leafy dust of autumn
the squash must be hacked, sawed, cracked, broken into in a thievery,
the found meat itself often dry and bitter as dead hearts before the fire.

Even in January

I am frightened.
We have been too fortunate,

the sun for us has soared too high.
The oak, laurel and flowering

pears on the property
have always stood lush and green;

late in the day, light gold as Russian tea
filters like God through the leaves

even in January.
The afternoon steals away behind the hill.

Soon it will be time to prepare supper,
set the table with white dishes or blue,

folded cloth napkins, wine glass, a bowl of olives;
time to engage in ceremony

that slows the weeks,
the years,

that briefly holds the day
in its hand.

© 2011 Georgia Jones-Davis