Vox Populi
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Michelle Bitting: Before Disappearing into the Fog
of dust & darkness
I remember spring in Los Angeles
near the coast
means fog and how
the chill can make morning
a confusion
a fog of minuets
in Mozart’s notebooks
can’t compete with it
the fog’s true desire
this morning
a fugue infusion
for the piano
while I coax spring
from slices of cantaloupe
their ripe hips
a fog of juice
caught above my chin
a sticky chill
I shiver in
fog blankets the spring
we must embrace it
here near the sea
soaked in fog
where feathers of radiance
streak the sky
the blood of light
burning off grief
overnight
where cream bursts
in a fog of bulbs
strolling the arms
of magnolia branches
an erotic alarm
the way the geese
above foggy lagoons
keep on erupting
their horns
a wing of music
slapping the fog silly
lifting despair
that will die
in a fog I’m told
meeting yours
sprung like birds
a fog of notes
we bury in the sky
before it burns us alive
~~~
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Michelle Bitting
Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022). Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
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Such rich imagery in this gorgeous fruit and fog poem!
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fruit and fog… what a lovely phrase. Thank you, Lisa.
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This swirls gorgeously; I love the lifting geese!
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I do too, Marty!
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I’m so glad to hear all these marvelous responses–thank you!
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”…a fog of minuets…”; “…a wing of music/slapping the fog silly….” So many imaginative images set in stunning language. I love these figurations in fog!
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I do too, Mary.
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where feathers of radiance
streak the sky
This is a new favorite metaphor. Thanks for it, Michelle.
It could either mean hidden sunbeams or fog-obscured cirrus clouds with their wispy radiance, or perhaps something more personal. It is sending me outdoors with my Minnesota camera, to seek out the sky-feathers.
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Sky-feathers!
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What a poem, dear Miche! I know, I know — that fog! Waking most mornings with the marine layer rounding the angles out there, hushing things a while, mysterious & resonant, how often I have wanted to praise that fog — then your images, your music, your on-&-off rhymes: oh my. Perfect. Bravo & merci beaucoup for every single line of these resonant & sad & wild & ode-filled couplets!
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You have some beautiful poems about the fog over the pacific, Laure-Anne. Something different than the fog over the city, isn’t it?
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It is, Michael, it is. It’s a thin layer coming in from the ocean, hushing noise, dimming light, mostly burned away by the sun mid-morning. But there’s something about that mist that brings whiffs of the ocean, like the lightest of sheets enveloping everything. I have to be careful NOT to put that marine layer/fog/mist in all my poems!
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Oh you are my favorite fog friend forever, Laure-Anne. All the kisses…And I miss you!!!
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Yes love the juxtaposition of cantalope and cold fog
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I like the conceit of fog becoming music, melon, despair…
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