The Pickers

...Zawinski is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com...

...Bodies at work, long after limbs tire, long after chests heave beneath bird-bone beads, abalone shells, scapulars dangling from red strings, or even chains of gold glinting off the sun, faces muffled in scarves and hoods, sweat scenting the air, backbent and dozens abreast, birthing a history of earth...

...Zawinski was born and raised in Pittsburgh, and is an alumna of the University of Pittsburgh...

...from Against the American Grain, by Charles Wright The pickers, backbent and dozens abreast, rise before the sun past the blonde grasses, behind the concertina wire running between Soledad and Salinas, move in squats, toss artichokes from sun-pocked fields into pickup cabs, calloused fingers pricked by the thorny thistles...

...And so they move, the pickers, silhouetted against the horizon, westerly winds crossing groves and vineyards farther north, farther south, they move, follow the crops, follow the seasons, Steinbeck's ghost among the harvest gypsies in the fields, pen in one hand, pail in the other, working towards some end...

...She now makes her home in Oakland, California, where she teaches writing...

...They pour seeds into rivulets of dry earth that will burst into lettuce, chard, the great bouquets of broccoli and cabbage along El Camino Real's humpback hills where foremen watch, arms folded across their dusty boredom and the long light of days stretching inside another summer...

...As sure as low clouds cool the day down, the bodies turn toward evening, lay down the ache of the field in the stretch of legs, slope of shoulders, move toward dreams of the unburned, pain-free, unafraid, unspent paper in the pocket for some half-hold on a home on the road, birds skittering tree branches at sunset, pecking at the unpicked...

...Her full collection, "Traveling in Reflected Light, " was released by Pig Iron Press as a Kenneth Patchen competition winner...

...Andrena Zawinski Andrena Zawinski writes poetry of social concern that has been widely published both in print and online...