Julia Levine

Poetry

Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including a 2021 Nautilus Award for her fifth poetry collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU press, 2021), as well as the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU, 2014). Recently she has won a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2023 Oran Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, the 2022 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, the 2020 Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Award, as well as a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science, and technology. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation and Prairie Schooner. She received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Currently she serves as Poet Laureate of Davis. sites.google.com/view/juliablevine

 

My Grandson’s First Week Back in the World

Take the sky, swallowed down by a warbler before it departs as song. Or darkness steeping those first fourteen months on the cancer floor in a white crib, before the canopies of Japanese maple leak red across the horizon, the lemon trees glowing in globes of juice. Today we return to the garden with its forbidden grass and soil, its bacteria and fungus that, for too long, would have killed him. But now, remade, maybe even cured, I can lift him into the swing’s basket where he flies, breathless, out and back, over the strange crossings he’s been asked to make. Then we walk into the sandbox under winter’s lean scythe of afternoon sun. Unstoppable, his want. Look at how he starts, coating his hands, his lips with dirt, his body finally anointed with the lush possibilities of earth.

“ My grandson spent most of his first year in the Children’s Oncology Floor at UCSF with infant leukemia. After multiple near death episodes from the chemo and a bone marrow transplant, he was almost 18 months before he could touch anything that was not sterilized. Taking him to the park for the first time was a truly ecstatic experience, not just for him, but for me! ”

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