The Freedom Writers is a group of seven poets that meets four times a year to spend a day engaged in a process called freewriting. Each poet brings an exercise meant to generate wild, amusing and maybe even wrenching writing. We spend 15 minutes on each exercise, writing quickly and without letting in the editorial voices that say, “This is terrible!” Then we read the freewrites aloud, but we do not critique them. What we are producing is the gist of a poem. The hard work comes later as we revise, read aloud while alone in an empty room and revise.
The poems printed here were generated from a bowl filled with strips of paper with cut-apart reports to the well-known Point Reyes Light’s Sheriff’s Calls. We hope you will enjoy what we’ve done. Joseph Zaccardi, the Marin County poet laureate, was ill the day we met for this session. A week later, Joe—who lives in Fairfax—wrote a poem with a series of lines from the Fairfax police log, a poem that is not included here, but you can hear him read it at regional poetry events.
We want you to know that most of us have appeared, at one time or another, either in this newspaper’s log or in the police log of some other community. We are not ashamed of this, but rather humbled and amused by the various actions that landed us there.
— Barbara Swift Brauer, CB Follett, Gayle Eleanor, Shawn Pittard, Robert McNally, Susan Terris and Joseph Zaccardi
Point Reyes Station: A man fell on his face in a parking lot.
Sometime after 3 p.m., a man fell on his face in a parking lot. It had not been a good day. At 8:30 a.m. he was fired for falling down on the job. By noon he worried about falling on hard times.
Having hit bottom, his luck turned around. A pretty young woman helped him up, led him into the Western Saloon where he tried to save face, telling the woman he was a movie maker on location. (Yes, she fell for it.)
When he saw his wife through the window, his face fell.
— Barbara Swift Brauer
Point Reyes Station: A woman asked for advice about a problem involving her mother, her sisters and expired drivers licenses.
So, you are asking what expired drivers licenses have to do with anything other than those silly DMV fees. My God, I’ve been driving since I was 11, and I don’t need no license to prove it. Mine is valid, if you gotta know, and you don’t, just to keep them overeager troopers off my back, so you can call me the law-abiding member of this clan. It’s the rest of them that’s got the problem I’m asking about.
So, Mama was driving the old Ford Explorer—you know, the blue one with the crushed fender from hitting a buck and the twisty bumper from backing into a redwood stump—and Christine, that’s my sister, was riding shotgun and Evangeline, that’s my other sister, was sitting in the back, right in the middle to keep the load balanced, and Mama was going the way she always goes, foot to the floor and straightening curves, to hell with the double yellow, smoke just boiling out the tailpipe like blue tule fog, when this state trooper—eager young bastard, ain’t from around here—comes out of ambush, pounces on the Explorer’s twisty bumper, and flips on his gumball machine, and his siren is just screaming.
Just before, Mama lighted up—Marlboro Light, you know, on account of her emphysema—and she looks up through the smoke at the rearview mirror and sees all these lights in all these colors swirling kinda magic-like. She thinks about stepping on it, but she knows the Explorer is just wheezing along, pretty much the way she is, and the trooper has this tricked-out Crown Vic so he’s gonna get her no matter, and she pulls over, going just fast enough to spit gravel back at the cop. Missed him, though, just the luck.
Up he comes, his Smoky hat on. She rolls down the window, all lady-like. “Registration and license, ma’am,” the trooper says.
Mama knows her license is three years dead, and she’s seeing no reason to extend the pain. Instead of reaching for her wallet, she takes a long drag, lifts the Marlboro Light off her lower lip, blows the smoke in the trooper’s face, and says, “Kiss my ass, sonny.”
Now you see what I’m saying?
— Robert Aquinas McNally
Stinson Beach: A woman called about a bird in the house.
An open window. On the sill a chesty gray-black bird with
Pink speckled feet. A rusty throat-
rumble, a scatter of wings,
then—inside—in her bedroom, a pigeon, with red-gel eyes,
manic, whacking windows and mirrors, jolting the reflective
sheen of picture frames. Frame this:
pigeon, pigeon, filthy
avian rat flying above, shitting fear on
her bed, her rug, on
her. Close door, she cries, manic as the
intruder. Broom,
broom, tennis racket. Invasive horror, a kind of house-rape.
Natural order overthrown. Threats threatening. Open more
windows. Mirror again. Fleas, lice,
vermin, feathers, more shit.
No control. Tears. Only a bird in the house—pigeon, dumb pigeon—
tells a single woman that, in this world, she is truly alone.
— Susan Terris
Olema: A man peed into a garbage can at the Point Reyes Seashore Lodge. He later agreed to pay $100 in damages and assume ownership of the can.
Instead of a tempest in a tea pot,
that was a pee in a trash canister.
Expensive though.
— Gayle Eleanor
San Geronimo: Someone reported the appearance of posters stating, “Let the wildfire burn,” likely in response to a meeting about wildfire prevention scheduled for that evening, the caller surmised.
Jupiter’s fierce pinpoint
was a beacon in the midnight sky
as Earth’s shadow eased
across the moon’s bright face.
A spark of color ignited
its ancient lava waves,
swept across the lunar plains.
Some observers
saw the color red—blood red—
and fanned the flames of the Apocalypse.
Astronomers likened
the spectral phenomenon
to a sunset. There was enough silence
to remember a childhood prayer.
Silence enough to worry
that it might be answered.
Tinder. Branch. Bough.
Let the wildfire burn.
— Shawn Pittard
Bolinas: A property owner called to ask for advice dealing with 911 calls involving “Hubbub and Higinx.”
Bolinas: Someone saw a man asleep in a blue sleeping bag inside a wooden structure below Terrace.
I live quietly. I pay my taxes.
I am not at the police station
but someone keeps telephoning
and yelling “911.” What shall I do
about Hubbub and Higinx?
Well how should I know.
I say, “I’m sitting here peacefully
watching Downton Abbey and Maggie
Smith has just arched her eyebrow
and I want to hear…
“Call the police,” I say.
“And,” she goes on, “what
to do about the man
in the blue sleeping bag
living in my chicken coop?”
She doesn’t sound nutso
but who is Higinx? And is
the sleeping bag man, Hubbub,
and you aren’t supposed to have
chickens in this town, and what
are the hens doing about the blue-
covered man in their coop?
Brooding on top of him,
or pushing their eggs underneath
to keep them warm?
Do they think he is a piece of sky,
and why doesn’t she just go
and tell him to move on—is he
her husband and they haven’t
a dog house? Why is she calling me?
Do I know her? She keeps calling
and screaming, and there’s loud
Beethoven in the background,
loud enough to riot the chickens
and wake her blue husband.
She cranks it up and I’m holding
the phone at arm’s length, then
hanging up. But I don’t move, because
she calls right back and finally
I unplug the phone. She’s still
shouting, “911. 911.” Now she’s
outside somewhere with the blue man,
and I suppose Hubbub, and surely,
Higinx as well. Are they getting
closer? Is she bringing the chickens?
“Go away now. Shoo.
Move off. Take the three men.
Nobody wants them.
I don’t want them.
I will take the chickens, though.”
— CB Follett
Barbara Swift Brauer is 30-year resident of San Geronimo. Her poetry collection, “At Ease in the Borrowed World,” was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2013.
Robert Aquinas McNally is the author or coauthor of nine books of nonfiction and the author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently “Songs of the Two Names,” which won the 2012 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Award. His poems have four times been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Susan Terris is the editor of Spillway Magazine and poetry editor of In Posse Review and Pedestal. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review, The Journal and Ploughshares.
Gayle Eleanor is a widely published poet whose poems reflect her love of nature and her interest in bridging the separation we often assume between ourselves and the natural world. She works with the INA Coolbrith Circle and Berkeley Poets.
Shawn Pittard is a poet, screenwriter and teaching artist. He is the author of two slender volumes of poetry, one of which, “Standing in the River,” won Tebot Bach’s 2010 Clockwise Chapbook Competition.
CB Follett is the author of eight books of poems, including “At the Turning of the Light,” which won the 2001 National Poetry Book Award. Follett was the poet laureate of Marin County from 2010 to 2013.