1 Poem by Joan E. Bauer

No Dancing Bears in Our Los Angeles

Never visited the zoo. Dad needed the car.
Mother didn’t drive. We lived two miles
from the Pacific & brought back sea shells

but never starfish which suffocate in minutes
out of water. I once assembled a plastic Disney squirrel
named Perri gluing on his fur & eyes.

Our mother collected desert tortoises that nested
behind the garage. George & Georgina, the oldest,
often escaped. Some neighbor would carry them back.

When we moved to Alamogordo, antelope & coyotes
roamed the hills above our military boom town.
Our dad, an engineer, not a hunter, never fired a shot,

but launched a thousand missiles. We killed scorpions
ignobly with borax or the whack of a shovel.
In Alamogordo, we had different pets:

a baby alligator we fed dead flies, the kangaroo rat
that Mother captured beneath her sun hat at White Sands.
They lived in a wash basin & trash can respectively

in the living room. This was not House Beautiful.

After two years, we returned to LA where a neighbor
had fostered our roving tortoises who still hoped,
as we did, for something more.

Bionote

Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics and Nature. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins (www.hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com)