Portia Trabue; "June Poem," "It Must Go On," "On the Bus Ride Home," "Freeway in the Blue"

Artist Feature: Portia Trabue / Poetry / Class of 2026

By Juliette AvRuskin

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June Poem

So, spacetime— which we move through under

only partially our control (we touch the fourth

dimension, we skate and skim over it thrust

by uncontrolled temporal momentum) makes,

in my mind, a map. It makes a graph of when

and where and there is where we intersect--

out of infinite coordinates, we stumble hapless

at first into the same one. And then we must leave it,

travel along, our function swerving and dancing

but never doubling back.

If I were to put it another way: I remember sunsets,

purple over San Francisco, cotton-candy pinks

crowning the lakebed, the orange of molten iron

cooling into the sea. The sun always dips beneath

the horizon, though, always sinks to the nadir of the

bowl of the sky, cracked with little stars. And it sets

again- sets, rises, and we hurtle through space

on our lonely little blue ball. The nimbus of light

that touches us, briefly vibrant and undeniable,

fades and changes and circles 'round, then.

You sing a song for the singing, for the harmonies,

to keep time to a heartbeat, for the noise of the

whole ordeal, crescendoing and spiraling--

music is time, technically. It's counts, it's vibrating

air which must travel to reach you, travel through

space and time: we experience time through

the vessel of space, through inertia or movement, the

Two are not so different after all: after all, after all.

You sing a song knowing that it ends, that the air stills

and quiets, and you sing something new again.

Sing it, sunset, though it will never again be this!

It'll be good, I swear--I'll chart us a course,

navigate that never--then-and-now map towards

the spiraling, crescendoing future, rising to a

zenith and dipping, cyclical, and as long as you

live you'll know you lived it--it'll never again be this,

it'll be good, but it'll never again be this--and grieve

that as the stars blink but watch for the next updraft

to catch, the sun that rises and gleams as it sets--

Let's laugh, dear, laugh without fear of the future.

It Must Go On

The mountain meets the sky, the moon,

the derricks drip silhouettes over the ocean and

the great orrery of the mind rambles

without fail or pause, the misanthropic

Mockingbird tendencies I harbor are this close to

making landfall at the docks, the docks,

where oily-slick sirens sing the alto line.

The show, the show! The nimbus about her

as she sang was golden-gauzy and oracular,

poor old me, poor old me! And I could look

lovingly for the silent footsteps of scene-change,

longingly, for the slant of her smile and

that charnel bearing she carries, she arrives

like wars she has never seen, existing against

alamodality and as the scene lovingly burrows

and slips, sneaks, sleeps.

The decadent low notes and the bright cold

of the piercing sky rub my neck, they twine

and twist me through alembics and decant

me and they eat, eat: behind the scrim I'll sing

a lifetime of love songs from the lonely

great beyond.

On The Bus Ride Home

Trolley-trains rattle the building bones,

cadence and city rhythm crashes, crowded,

crowds tease and tumble home, loans

lingering time to my intellect shockingly lauded.

The Manor Garden, The Second coming,

words flit about all doom and wandering gloom:

I ride home in the lonely gloaming, roaming,

Watching river reflections of window-light bloom.

The candles of the city burn bright at nights as

we string candied stars from cold iron catwalks,

I watch them walk out all keeping company to pass

by and I linger, shy, at the outer edge of talks.

As the night trundles on, I sink and spiral tighter:

the false basis I operate on, the open wounds that

linger at the base, the crux, the fact of the matter

that faces are, to me, a mask of mystery and tact.

Freeway in the Blue

I recall the gauzy gaze of the world out the windshield of your car:

winding roads, the candle-lights of encroaching cars in growing gloaming, gathering

dark and the sky ultraviolet blue,

music from my phone and map on yours and both on the dashboard,

nearly falling off every time you turned—

I don't know if that meant anything to you.

I doubt it did.

Your fingers on the wheel and your profile wheeling past,

I was barely catching you out the corner of my eye

with your curls falling and blunted nails — how beautiful!

I made an effort not to stare, you with eyes on the road as the wide emptiness

of the rolling country ran past.

It was nice to watch the world go by with you,

it was nice to watch you

as the world went by.

What were you watching, I wonder?

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Portia Trabue (she/her) is a current junior at St. Mary’s Academy, who draws inspiration for her poetry from everything around her: inspirational quotes on a school wall (June Poem) to hearing the bus drive by (On the Bus Ride Home) to theatre productions (It Must Go On) to feeling the huge blueness of the Eastern Oregon sky (Freeway in the Blue) and everything in between. She describes her poetry-writing process as partially “fugue states in the middle of the night” often inspired by emotions needing to be put into poems, and more rarely as intentional sit-downs to write. Despite her description of late-night fugue states, Portia’s poetry contains layers of meaning and thought in their construction.

In her “June Poem,” Portia wrote about the passage of time, inspired by the graduation of several of her friends from high school. She also included a quote written on a wall on the school: “Laugh without fear of the future,” which she realized came from Proverbs 31 and is in fact about how to be a good wife! While not used in the religious sense it was written in, the quote still adds depth to a poem about leaving school and the moving nature of time. Portia also added a layer of juxtaposition by her use of scientific and mathematical terms (such as inertia, sound waves, and coordinates, among others) in an emotional poem, which she mentions also adds a layer of credibility—and certainly shows her ability to craft intricate poetry with layers of meaning and creativity.

In her poem “On the Bus Ride Home,” Portia’s experiences of public transit include feeling the bus shake a whole building as it rides past and riding the bus as well. However, Portia also constructs the poem to show “the loneliness sneaking up on the reader—you’re lured into a false sense of safety by trolleys” while in reality, the end of the poem shifts into revealing “open wounds and watching other people hang out without you.” She uses the structure of the poem itself to lure the reader in, constructing a feeling of safety before taking it away. 

In her poem “It Must Go On,” Portia was inspired by seeing a nearby high school’s performance of Grease and by the words of Sylvia Plath, whose quotes are referenced (specifically when she talks about sirens singing a descant—Portia changes this to mentioning the alto line, reflecting her voice part). In addition to her layers of Plath and watching theatre productions, Portia also references her experience in her own musical during her freshman year, of being backstage and watching a lead sing onstage. The complexity of ideas that she writes into her poems showcases her skill as a writer and her talent and wisdom within her craft.

Her final poem featured in Escribe Maria in 2024, “Freeway in the Blue,” also carried two meanings. The first is of driving through Eastern Oregon in a blue car under “quite possibly the bluest sky I have ever seen. It really was ultraviolet, that’s not an exaggeration.” The second theme of the poem, combined beautifully with the first, is the idea of caring about someone more than they care about you or at least more than they will admit they care about you. 

Portia’s intended audience, if she had to choose one, is lonely people, or for “people who have felt lonely in ways that have shaped how they see the world.” 

Portia Trabue