poetry now - may/june 2011

May / june 2011 | Poetry Now | 1www.sacrameNtoPoetryceNter.org

poetrynow

Sacramento Poetry CentersPc

may / june 2011

Book Review: Maia Penfold’s Red Buddha n inteRview with Keith eKiss

featuring

Free

Shadi Gex and Agnes Stark are Poetry Now poetry editors. James Benton and Shadi Gex were featured

alumni readers for the first day of the CSUS Festival of the Arts. this photo was taken after their reading.

Photo by Sandy thomas.

youNg voices

Poems from poets under the age of eighteen.

Kate CaMPBell

linda

Collins

shadi

Gex

MaRCelo

heRnandez Castillo

PatRiCia Killelea

allison

Moen

ann wehRMan

Casey luM ellie RidGe

What a fine little book this is. I say little because it runs only forty-five pages, not because its impact or artistry are small, and I could have said fun in addition to fine, but calling something a fun little book might trivialize what instead is a real achievement.

Red Head womanby Gene averylittle m press, 2011

ContinUeS on PAGe FoUR

SpC AnnuAl MeMberShip Meeting & eleCtionSAugust 8th • 6pm1719 25th stReetsaCRaMento

2 | Poetry Now | May / june 2011 a PubliCation of the SaCraMento Poetry Center

preSident’S MeSSAge

bob StAnley

poetrynow

editor: trina DrotariNterview editor: lisa jonesiNterview coNtributor: Dorine jennetteiN dialogue: alexandra thomasPoetry editors: Shadi Gex, alexa Mergen, agnes StarkstaFF: linda Collins, Sandra SennedesigN/ProductioN: richard hansencoPyeditiNg: Shadi Gex, ann Wehrmansocial Network Publicist: Shadi GexstaFF PhotograPhers: trina Drotar, Sandy thomas

the Poet tree, also known as the Sacramento Poetry Center, is a non-profit corporation dedicated to providing forums for local poets—including publications (Poetry now and tule review), workshops, special events, and an ongoing reading series. funded primarily by members, SPC is entirely run by a volunteer board of directors. We welcome your input and your interest.

board oF directors:

bob Stanley, Presidenttim Kahl, Vice PresidentSandra Senne, treasurerfrank Graham, SecretaryKate aschelinda Collinslawrence Dinkins, jr.trina l. DrotarPaco Marquez coNtact iNFormatioN:1719 25th Street • Sacramento, CA [email protected] • 916-979-9706www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org

Poetry noW, the Sacramento region’s literary review and calendar, is published by the Sacramento Poetry Center (SPC) and is funded in part with grants from the Sacramento Metropolitan arts Commission. Submissions of poems, artwork, reviews, and other work of interest to the Sacramento poetry community are welcome. note that work submitted may also appear on the Poetry now website.

Poem submissioNsSubmit poems and a 30-50 word bio to the poetry editor at [email protected]. electronic submissions preferred.

distributioN

Poetry noW is distributed in area bookshops, Sacramento City and County libraries, and by mail to member-subscribers. if you are interested in receiving Poetry now, or want multiple copies to share with others, please contact us.

theresa McCourt alexa Mergen rebecca Morrisonjonathan Schoutenemmanuel SigaukeMary Zeppa

sPc

Yesterday, I had a chance to attend my first SAYS slam competition, and it was exciting to see 35 young people read or “spit” their own poems—original work. The students ranged from 11 to 18, and they all were brave enough to get up in front of a big audience and say their piece. SAYS is a very worthy project that brings together hundreds of students and gives them a voice. If you get a chance to attend the final slam in Davis on May 13, I’d recommend it highly!

Kirk Parker, a great friend of SPC and the entire Sacramento artistic community, passed away suddenly in March. He was a creative and gentle soul, and it was always a pleasure to see him arrive at a reading. Kirk was only 50, and it’s hard to believe he’s not still working, writing, and helping others in the community events he loved. We’ll miss Kirk and his intellectual flights of fancy at the open mic.

Alexa Mergen and I visited New Folsom Prison in March, and it was both a sobering and an inspiring visit. We had the chance to work with about a dozen men who are in a writing group. They all wrote short pieces and shared their work, and we talked about different elements of poetry. It was two hours of quiet conversation, artists talking about what makes art work. SPC is honored to support their work, and I really appreciate the work Alexa is doing to continue these visits.

Thanks to everyone who has helped make poetry events happen this April. Ladies Night Out at the Guild was a full house, the Sister Spit: Next Generation at the California Stage was a big splash and a first-time collaboration between SPC and Poetry Unplugged/Frank Andrick, the SPC Poetry Conference was a great success, the Opening Day Poets event was a home run, and LitFix at the Crocker was a night to remember. It takes a lot of dedicated poets and friends of poetry to keep the art alive—thank you!

FirSt wedneSdAySpoetry SerieSHosted by Bob Stanley6pm. Central Library, 828 I Street. Sacramento

presents

sPc CAllS For SubMiSSionS Write for Details

Young Voices [email protected] Mail Review [email protected] Review [email protected]

ConteStSSPC Book Contest • sacpoetrycenter.wordpress.comSwan Scythe Press • www.swanscythe.com


We’ve come a long way this past year. We’ve added more photos, more columns, and are distributing more widely than ever before. Thanks to our designer, Richard Hansen, our online version is in full color. A great group of people invests much work and love into each and every issue. “Young Voices” and “In Dialogue” have become popular, as has “Small Press Corner.”

A few issues back, I suggested that you attend readings outside of your comfort zone. I wonder how many of you have done so. One reader, Sacramento’s own Sandy Thomas, did. Look for her reflections in this issue in “Event Mirror.”

Speaking of readings and events, have you checked out the following Sacramento venues: Red Night Poetry at Beatnik (3rd Wednesday – hosted by Genelle Chaconas), Midtown Out Loud at Mondo Bizarro at 19th and I Streets (1st and 3rd Wednesdays), or Art Bazaar put on by Sacramento’s own Yaz and featuring poetry, art, and music every second Saturday? Look for more information on Facebook.

Another event that I will not miss is the Squaw Valley Community of Writers fundraiser at the Crocker Art Museum on July 15 featuring Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, and many others. Tickets are sure to sell out fast at $20 each. I’ll be there, will you?

Poetry Now will be on hiatus for the July/August and September/October issues. Poetry Now will return for the year-end special issue in November, which is the last issue I’ll work on with Richard Hansen and the rest of the Poetry Now team. Please note that adult submissions of poetry have been closed. Young Voices poetry submissions should be sent to this new email, [email protected].

If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please feel free to email me at [email protected].

trinA l. drotAr

editor’S MeSSAgeSMAll preSS Corner

Swan Scythe Presshttp://swanscythe.com

Swan Scythe Press is a local, small publisher “committed to discovering and publishing the best new poets in America today.” Currently headed up by James DenBoer and founded by Sandra McPherson, Swan Scythe has published award-winning books by authors such as Francisco X. Alarcon, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Nwando Mbanugo, Betty Davis Miller, Yosefa Raz, Joan Swift, and Nhan Trinh—and will release a book by its newest author, Patricia Killelea, this spring. Patricia, along with Shadi Gex and Marcelo Hernandez, will read at SPC on June 6, 2011. Her new book will be available for purchase and signing. Please look for poems by these three poets in this issue of Poetry Now.

Swan Scythe also sponsors an annual chapbook contest. The June 1, 2011 deadline is fast approaching. For details, please visit their website where you will find additional authors, a list of titles published, and more information about this local press.

behind the SCeneSFor three years, Linda Collins has managed SPC’s membership roster and has produced mailing labels for Poetry Now. For the past year, Linda has worked as a co-editor of Tule Review and co-host of the release readings, which are always well attended. About herself, she says, “Like our other SPC board members, I write poetry and participate in various writing groups. As for my day job, I am a project manager for AT&T. There’s nothing much poetic about that!”

n medusaskitchen.blogspot.com n eskimopie.netn sacramento365.com

poetry event CAlendArS

tueSdAySpoetry workShopFacilitated by Danyen Powell7:30pm. e.M. Hart Senior Center915 27th Street. Sacramento

new and experienced poets welcome. Bring 15 copies of one, one page poem.

sPc


I’ll confess, too, that I had doubts when I picked it up. The typeface often changes and changes size in mid-page, and also wanders about in a way that takes some getting used to, and there’s quite a bit of unattributed or minimally attributed dialogue, as well as slang and non-standard use of language. For those not typically drawn to the surreal—a category that includes me—such things can pose a challenge or even cause migraines, but in this case, no problem.

The reader of Red Head Woman quickly acquires a sense of clarity and of the book’s logic, which ultimately the typographical hi-jinks both support and enlarge, and the same applies to the clever artwork, also by Avery, that appears throughout. In other words, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

By coincidence, I read Flannery O’Connor’s celebrated novel Wise Blood at the same time as I read this book, and while they’re not at all similar in plot, setting or theme, they are in their quirkiness, their originality of language and dialogue, and in the creation of compelling fictional realities via the slow, seemingly effortless, accretion of detail.

In this latter respect, in fact, Avery’s book may even be superior. What we have is a street-weary main character who is endlessly loyal to his former lover, the red head woman in question, whom we never meet except in his memories, because she has mysteriously disappeared.

In his off-and-on search for her, however, our unlikely hero arouses the unwelcome suspicions of the cops. Much of this emerges through dialogue, with the settings described only in passing, yet we still come away

Red Head Woman

book reviewby Bill Pieper

with a strong understanding of who these people are, of their humanity, their longings, and of the places in the Sacramento region that form the background of their lives—a very impressive writerly trick.

The current volume is known to be an excerpt from a longer work and it’s billed ironically on the cover as Book 4–Module 1. Avery says more installments may follow, or they may not, as the spirit moves him. If any do, though, I’ll be an eager buyer, and will meanwhile just have to be nostalgic for the days when pulpy magazines made it possible for the likes of Dickens and Dostoyevsky to publish serial novels as a routine thing. Of course they’d be doing that on the Web now, so maybe Avery will too.

ContinUeD FRoM tHe FRont PAGe

SpC will be CloSed on MondAy, July 4


book reviewby ann wehrman

the Red Buddhaby Maia Penfoldhcolom Press, 2010

the poems in The Red Buddha comment naturally

and perceptively on deep-life issues, without

artifice, with humor and restraint, using simple,

everyday diction and mostly mundane images

from daily life.

Truthsayer It is tempting to scrutinize the poems in Maia Penfold’s The Red Buddha with a twenty-first century, product-of-an-English-graduate-school program, literary-critic’s-arguably-jaded eye. As such, one might find fault with Penfold’s style as appearing unpolished or overly humble. Penfold’s “I’s” are lower case; in fact, almost no words are capitalized in the collection (including proper nouns). Seemingly randomly, certain poems have every first word capitalized. Penfold’s diction is straightforward and unsophisticated rather than complex. Line breaks seem random rather than calculated to enhance meaning.

However, with sincere respect for such nay-saying colleagues, I confess Penfold’s poems in The Red Buddha move me, both as a woman and a human being. Penfold, originally Gerda Penfold, is an octogenarian who lived and wrote poetry in the 1960’s in California and whose voice has not lost the humility and deep connection to humanity, Earth, and the entire universe for which the flower children of that decade traded brain cells, corporate jobs, university educations, and the American Dream.

I do not admire her work because it takes me back to the 1960’s, however. Penfold’s poems resonate with timeless humor, sensuality, life, and wisdom. The understanding and confidence in her voice and her message speak from millennia ago, quietly and steadily with women’s wisdom or that of the world-inheriting meek.

Rather than featuring fancy wordplay or obscuring subject matter through a decorative style, the poems in The Red Buddha comment naturally and perceptively on deep-life issues, without artifice, with humor and restraint, using simple, everyday diction and mostly mundane images from daily life. Her words breathe, the lines breaks creating readable, rather than intellectual, emphasis. In “Sturm and Drang,” she writes:

the words are heavy indigo shot with lightning shudders advancing relentless a downpour we are wet soaked to the skin with rain strum and drang the words wring us out this is my mother tongue ………………………. midorsin migeesegau the cree woman said saying it’s a nice day her syllables soft floating like feathers her words a song of praise. (1-8, 38-42)

The seventy-six poems in The Red Buddha read like stories told on a long, road trip or before a campfire. They air Penfold’s wisdom and commentary on issues ranging from childhood memories to twin souls to Paul Klee’s paintings to Marilyn Monroe. One can hear Penfold reading these poems. One can imagine her reading from a sheaf of pages clutched in one hand in a warm kitchen with mugs of comfort all around. One can hear her reading aloud in a field of corn, the wind taking the pages from her hand one by one as she finishes them.

Rattlesnake pRess pResentsWednesday, June 8, 7:30pm

Join us for the release ofInsIDe (love poems)

a new Rattlechap Chapbook by

ann WehRman

all at the Book Collector (home of the snake)

1008 24th st. sacramento


interviewby dorine Jennette

Keith Ekiss is the author of Pima Road Notebook (2010, New Issues Poetry & Prose). His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. His translations have appeared widely in such journals as Circumference, Copper Nickel, Mid-American Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Subtropics. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, Ekiss is now a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing there. He teaches courses in poetry and other genres, and for Stanford’s Online Writer’s Studio, he teaches poetry and creative nonfiction.

Pima Road Notebook is a linked collection that interweaves personal narratives, lyrics of landscape, and exploration of the Southwest region’s complex cultural mix and history. The book braids together observations from a childhood spent in Arizona’s suburban desert-scape, sequences exploring the natural history of the area, and stories of its original inhabitants. In these latter poems, Ekiss sketches the Pima people’s pre-colonial traditions, architecture, and agriculture, and then their suffering at the hands of westward-moving European expansion. He studies also the changes in the area’s bird and plant life that have accompanied its changes in population. Pima Road Notebook combines ecopoetics with accessible, musically tight narrative and lyric pieces.

Ekiss’s connection to the Sacramento Poetry Center began with his first published poem ever, which appeared in the Tule Review. More recently, Keith Ekiss’s wife, poet Robin Ekiss, read at SPC in 2009 from her book The Mansion of Happiness. Keith will complete the Ekiss family SPC showcase when he reads from Pima Road Notebook on July 11.

them, were about my childhood in Arizona. Eventually, I started writing poems about the history of the Pima Indians, whose reservation bordered the neighborhood in Scottsdale where I was raised. These poems became important to figuring how to situate my personal story against the larger history that we’ve all inherited.

Jennette: Those poems about the Pima Indians are among the most vivid in the collection. Can you speak a little bit about your strategies, aesthetic and ethical, in approaching that project?

ekiss: I approached writing about the Pima with quite a bit of hesitation. Growing up in Arizona, I’d read plenty of poems and stories by non–Native Americans that attempted to appropriate “Indian-ness,” often with well-intentioned, but short-sighted, reasons. My main concern was to let the poems tell their own stories, to stick with

Jennette: Pima Road Notebook is an intricately layered work. At what point, working on the individual poems, did you realize you were writing a linked collection? Or did you know from the beginning? ekiss: I definitely didn’t know from the beginning that I was writing a linked collection. Knowing where you want to go with your material as a poet can be helpful, [in that] it gives you a place to return to each day, much like a fiction writer working on a novel, but it can also impinge on your creativity, making you write for the collection rather than for the poem at hand. I steered a path in the middle of these two options: I wrote poems about the Southwest for a long time, but I also wrote many poems about other topics, often related to place, that ended up not belonging in this collection. As my writing progressed, it became clear that the better poems, the ones with the most emotional energy and complexity behind

Cover More Ground: Keith Ekiss on Place, Story, and History


the images and facts and avoid judgments. I did a lot of research, especially in a series of books by Amadeo Rea, who investigated the Pima’s traditional relationship to the land and how it’s changed over the past 150 years. I was conscious of trying not to romanticize the Pima way of life; nevertheless, the record is clear that they were never at war with the U.S. and only helped starving settlers who were on their way to California. I’m aware that I’m treading on some difficult ethical ground in telling a story that’s not my own, but I can only hope that any criticism of the work is given in the same spirit in which it was written.

Jennette: Some of your Pima poems, like some of your other poems in the collection, are sonnets. Can you talk a bit about your relationship to received poetic forms?

ekiss: Many of the sonnets in the book are “accidental.” Meaning, I didn’t always set out to write a sonnet, but the revision process often pulled the poem into what I’ll call the gravitational field of the sonnet, which can be quite strong. In that sense, the sonnets in the book, because they often didn’t start out as sonnets, don’t feature many of the form’s traditional elements, most especially the rhetorical development of an argument. I use the brevity of the sonnet to compress narrative and house image. So the long sequence, “Landscape with Saguaros,” which is a crown of sonnets, where the last line of each poem becomes the first line of the next poem, sometimes with variations, was not started as a sonnet sequence. I’d written a number of poems, none of which seemed finished, and I started noticing the way the poems were speaking to one another, how they all seemed part of one larger poem, so I brought the material into sonnet form and looked for hinges and development between the individual poems. I find that working within the restrictions of a closed form can help structure and focus a poem’s material, but that doesn’t mean that the poem needs to begin as a closed form.

Jennette: What sorts of poems are you working on now? And, any non-poetry writing projects on your desk?

ekiss: . . . For the last year I’ve been writing about San Francisco and the Bay Area, mainly in the form of prose

poems, which I think have loosened up my style and allowed me to cover more ground, so to speak . . . I have a near-complete manuscript of translations, the selected poems of a Costa Rican writer named Eunice Odio, who died in 1974. She’s their leading poet of the twentieth century and there hasn’t been a collection of her work published yet in translation . . . I’m not actively working on any creative nonfiction at the moment, but I hope to make time in the near future for writing about my experiences working in Silicon Valley for ten years.

Jennette: How has your writing life changed since becoming a father?

ekiss: Good question! My writing process has changed, out of necessity, since becoming a father last year. Our son Benjamin was born on March 26, the birthday of Robert Frost, so we have high hopes for his poetic career, if he chooses to follow his parents. Before becoming a father, I usually liked to write when I knew I had a large block of time in front of me. So, I would typically try and write for three to four hours in the morning. But, as a parent, you follow the child’s schedule, so I now write when I can. Sometimes this means waking up early and writing for an hour or two before he wakes up, or it means taking a half an hour when inspiration strikes. In general, I think this lack of free time has given my poetry a more urgent quality. I need to make the poem work the best I can when given the opportunity. Of course, he’s also given me a new subject about which to write.

…

Dorine Jennette is the author of Urchin to Follow (The National Poetry Review Press, 2010). Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as Verse Daily, the Journal, Puerto del Sol, the Los Angeles Review, the New Orleans Review, and the Georgia Review. Originally from Seattle, she earned her MFA at New Mexico State University, her PhD at the University of Georgia, and now lives in Suisun City, California.


what would a poetry reading about

baseball be without collectible poet

trading cards!?

opening dAy poetS April 6th, 2011

MAJor leAgue poet bASebAll On April 6, 2011, The Sacramento Room was transformed into a grandstand waving red and yellow poet pennants. The first ten fans received baseball poet cards. Bob Stanley, the team manager, introduced the line-up with each poet’s stats. The evening was filled with the poets reading baseball poems, theirs or others.

Team poets from left to right and back to front are: Ann Conradsen, Viola Weinberg, Martha Ann Blackman, Peggy Kincaid, Ann Menebroker, Sandy Thomas, JoAnn Anglin, Allegra Silberstein, Bob Stanley, Trina Drotar, Reiner Kahl, and Tim Kahl. Not pictured is pinch hitter, Carlos Alcalá.

The official MLPB (Major League Poet Baseball) sponsors are Poems-For-All (which designed the Poet Cards) and the Sacramento Poetry Center.

—Sandy Thomas

opening day poets

11 cards

april 6, 2011

poet cards Photo by Jen Cimaglio


poeMS by allison Moen

Sonnet for the Farm

When the ditch flooded, I waded, thigh-deep, splashing until mud caked onto my knees,seeped through my swimsuit striped purple and pink.Nothing stopped me, those summer afternoons,from climbing to my branch on the apricot tree,using the knot to rest my dirty feet.I snickered when mom passed by. She didn’t see me.From my perch, I soaked in everything:Green John Deere tractors rumbling down the road,feedlot aroma coating the breeze,sprinkler spray misting my sunburned cheeksas it combed over rows of corn and milo.

I didn’t notice the sun settinguntil the whirr of locusts lured me down.

Poolfor Jordan

We dove underwater and told stories of mothers and fathers, histories of scars in between legs and inside hearts,chlorine and secrets spilling from our lips

an ease of breathing.

I hid no verbs or adjectives.

We waded waist-high,the Fresno sun drying our exposed shoulders.

When the 115-degree heat melted water droplets from our skin,we tiptoed over hot concreteand laid our bare backs across plastic pool furniturerubber strips cracked from heatindenting lines between the tattoos drawn down your spine.

Water and sweat dripping from my hands into ink onto paper:

This friendship of water and words.

For rent

Someone new moved into our house today.Trudged their cardboard boxes up our stairs,hung their jackets on the hooksyou attached to the hallway wallwith your dad’s drill.

Someone slept in the room we came home toand left from. The room we sunk intoafter long days. Long drives.

The home we came home to the first timewe were we.

The worn hardwood floor knowsour secrets.

Someone’s underwear pileson the built-in shelf where I stacked my jeans.

Music floats over the back porch railingwhere I rested my forearms,breathed in the city sounds past midnight,comforted friends over the phone.Staring at the overgrown weeds of vacancyand an empty parking lot.

Underneath the heater, the smell of amber lingers from the candle I left unattended.Scraped the wax with a spatula,but missed some spots.

In the bottom of someone’s new oven,crumbs from our charred crusts gather.

tides

The moon shines over ocean waves and you hear them crashing. These rocks you walked on, barefoot, sat on at night when the sky and water shared the same blackness except for the thin white crests. These mossy rocks you slipped and scraped your knees on, wanted to carve your initials into. These rocks you kneeled on to stick your fingers into suctioned mouths of sea anemones before the tide came in and covered them.

In college, we drove to the beach at midnight to see the “red tide”—the rare time in early winter when billions of decaying phytoplankton lit up the waves with iridescent blue. Neon death sprinkled like a glow stick strewn across the sand. We forgot a blanket and dug our feet into the sand. Stared up at stars. Woke up shivering.

o


poeMS by ann wehrman

Variations on Perfect, opus 1

Hearing me play, your smile tells me I’m flatHuman voice howls outside the locked doorBread just from the oven; my mouth watersDouble-digit unemployment Rain thunks, whooshes, drives, pittersSilence

Longing I can only speak your namemy thoughts try to take up a taskonly to melt into calling your namewhisper tumble of your hairpull of tendons in your forearmslender base phalanges of your fingerseyes steel blue into gray blue into rain blueI can only cry your name

night vision

Three a.m. pitch darkness, wake alone and turn, keep the light off,look inside, down a corridor of space, searching for your shoulders, your back, my hands reach, gently caress. Is it all right? In sleepy assent, your voice responds in my mind, Hold me, touch me,and I know where to touch you, though we act as strangers, have never gone out,I can’t call you, to let you know I am losing my mind waiting for you, who might never be mine.Comforting you, I find my own; my body relaxes, warms, responds, as if you were in my bed, not yours, or with someone else. It seems we share this closeness, so much more than sex—so that I (it seems we) cry as we make love in waking dreams at three a.m.,pledge our lives, pledge fidelity,how can it seem that we care this much, yet only be a one-sided fantasy, all a mistake?

now

You say I never write poemsabout now, only the past.Evening settles in.Buildings turn pink.Bells toll at Grace Cathedral.You shake a silver tumbler,ice clinking out storiesof the day’s hopes,as your fingers brace against frostbite.

Okay, I will.

I will write you poemsof how yesterday the sky was azurethen turned to tourmalineas fog rolled against Grace Cathedral, chillingchildren playing four square,scattering their laughterlike the silver tumbleras it clinks and shakesour hopes.

In my mind, I write poems for you of days and nightswe cannot get enoughbefore now fadesinto blurriness of the past ,the way fog swallowsGrace Cathedraland its silver hopesthat tumble out into Sunday mornings.

My heart beats poems of us now,of legs laced, arms entwined,hands meditating over landscape of skin,eyes shining the hope of silver tumblers,blurring flaws the way lovers dounder skies of blue and tourmaline.

I will write poems of strangerswho remind me of youas I glance from the windowof an apartment that is yoursand sometimes ours.I imagine the way you’ll lookand walk and what you’ll wear,not now, but twenty years from nowas you shake a silver tumblerthat held our hopesas it clinked against a sky of blue and sometimes tourmalineand the eyes of Grace Cathedral.

—Shadi Gex


poeMS by Patricia Killeleanaránjas

It was early fall when he broke my mother’s promise and took me anywaysto sell oranges door to doorto build some character.I walked tall through the Hollywoodtrailer park of West Linda,lugging a bag to sellto pasty old gavachos lounging on porches, flipping through The Christian Science Monitor.I must have been tenand my father, walking behind me,in his late forties. He followed me from a distance,like my mother walking me to school.I pretended not to hear the leaves crackling under his boots and clutched the bag to feign that I was strong enough. At the steps, I tapped the doorand yelled inside with a voiceslipping into a childish squeak,naránj-as! I left the bag and scurried back to the truck,without thinking why my father was already buckled.I lied and told him, que al rato me la paga.He sunk into his seat and sighed,no le digas a tu madre.We thundered down the main roadin our Ford ’77 pic-upI held an orange in my hand;there is an air pocket betweenthe leaf-stalk and pulp,the emptiness that it grows into.I peeled it there, savoredthe sour beads andfound reason not to drive on his lap the last mile home.

—Marcelo Hernandez true north I move forward in the sound—killer whales returning my name,the shore not far from where I’d dreamt. I row the light from other suns when words come up for air. Suppose there is a meteor showerand we are all about to be born.

A Voice to travel 1.So many faces hovering the shore, confused about prayer—must it be scripted, must there be a god listening in?

I want to say “No matter to me” and walk with my black boots along the rocks, gathering

the smooth round pebbles that remind me so much of poets, desperate and stammering. 2. A long bird is maybe some kind of prayer, its seeking eye skimming the tidepools— what is plucked and swallowed will serve as the amen.

Children know this and I remember knowing this too, though I am taking the long way back. 3. When I get to the place of good words, I will speak a fire— I do not wish for shield from winds, nor even that my small fire shall last the night.

The prayer in me knows only that I will prepare a voice to travel. 4. It’s in the preparation, then: all the silences of the world gathered around you

and the sound of your life saying itself to life again, crawling with ridiculous hope out of the cold, dim sea

j


on Midvale Lane

A creek ran behind our housewhere kids scooped mud for piesand trapped tadpoleswho later died a dry shoebox death.Trickling water spilled a harmless lullabyuntil the day Nancy’s little brotherwent missing. Chins on windowsills,we big kids watchedumbrella’d grown-upssearch the neighborhoodlike ocean-skimming gulls.Someone found a sodden shoeboxalong the creek’s swollen bankand people gatheredas men arrived to drag.When they snagged one blue Kedby its perfect rabbit-eared lacesNancy’s mom collapsedinto her own armswhile the others folded their umbrellasunder sleet-streaked skies.

Flower Children, 1969 We weren’t real hippiesstill, we looked the part

feet hidden by bell bottom jeanspeace sign pendants bumping our chests

knees dusted by fringedangling from braided leather belts.

We sang Marrakesh Expressinto microphone thumbs

shouted make love not warat dads in Buicks

shuffled through the neighborhood’sfiery yellow and blood red leaves

giddy over the moon’s “magnificent desolation” and Nixon’s troop withdrawals in those afternoons before darknessbefore we learned of Charlie Company’s

savage rampage and that spinning Revolution 9 backwards says

Turn me on, dead man.

poeMS by linda Collins

Deadline July 15, 2011open to writers from the western u.s.20-24 pages of poetry on any theme. $10 entry fee - checks payable to sPC. winner receives publication and 50 copies of chapbook. do not put your name on the manuscript pages. attach a separate page with

contact information and the title of the collection.

SpC’S 2011 Quinton duvAl ChApbook ConteStfinal judge: dennis schmitz

Send paper manuscripts (and checks for all entries) to:

sacramento Poetry CenterAttn: Quinton Duval Chapbook Contest1719 25th streetsacramento, CA 95816

Send questions to: [email protected]

poetry venueS Around SACrAMento And beyondLuna’s Café

(thursdays)Midtown outLoud at Mondo Bizarro

(1st and 3rd wednesdays)nevada County Poetry Series, Grass valley

(3rd thursdays)Rattlesnake Press at the Book Collector

(2nd wednesdays)Red night Poetry at Beatnik Gallery

(3rd wednesdays)Sacramento Poetry Center

(Mondays – other special events/locations)


Joshua Mckinney hosting

Festival of the Arts at CSUS

4.13.11. the photos of Joshua

Mckinney and Peter Grandbois

were taken at the CSUS Festival

of the Arts. Joshua Mckinney

hosted the readings over a period

of 4 days. Peter Grandbois is a

former english professor at CSUS,

and he was reading from his

newest novel, nahoonkara.

Photos by trina Drotar (Josh)

and Sandy thomas (Peter).

CSuS FeStivAl oF the ArtS april 13th, 2011

lunA’S CAFÉ poetry unplugged april 14th, 2011

2/24/11 SF Main Public Library, San Francisco, CA. 6 pm

toni Mirosevich read from her new book, The Takeaway Bin (2010 Spuyten Duyvil), which was inspired by “Oblique Strategies.” Maisha Z. Johnson, activist and fiction writer, presented her poetry side, while Mary Peelen, a theologian and mathematician, tells us that when she goes to the beach she takes a math book to read. Poetry worlds open up to us with a different spin.

3/17/11 Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael, CA. 7:30 pm

ellery Ackers read her confessional poetry, Jane Hirshfield read with her quiet presence and reserve, and Kay ryan completed the poetry song with her ability to incite laughter and add light with her words. These amazing women were published in Sixteen Rivers Press’ The Place that Inhabits Us (2010).

Update: Kay ryan, the 16th United States Poet Laureate (2008-2010), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on April 18, 2011 for her collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010 Grove Press).

4/13/11 the Book Collector, Sacramento, CA. 7:30 pm

The evening’s theme was the celebration of the Lucky Seven Rattlesnake Birthday. Wrangler-in-Chief Kathy Kieth hosted an audience of snakepals. D.r. Wagner read from his new book, A Limited Means of Expression, (2011 Rattlesnake Press – www.rattlesnakepress.com) leaving his words resonating in our hearts.

Photos of Ann Menebroker and Josh Fernandez

were taken at Luna’s when Bill Gainer, Ann

Menebroker, and Josh Fernandez were featured

readers. it was the evening of red noses—Bill

passed them out. Photos by Sandy thomas

event Mirror by sandy thomas

MARy, toni, MAiSHA

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Submit poems for young voicessubmit 1-3 poems at a time, a one-sentence bio, and an email address with the name of a contact person. no more than two submissions during a calendar year, please. [email protected] subject line: young Voices. we seek poems that show the world through young eyes with insight, humor or both.

Please allow 1-3 months for consideration by the editors. if your poem is selected for publication, you must sign a release form authenticating that it’s your original work and granting Poetry Now permission to print it.

Young VoicesPoems from poets under the age of eighteen.

Forever Dancing

I am graceful and dazzling.Imagination pulls me,pride rises in me.Forgetting worries me.Tears come when I can’t do the step.I am graceful and dazzling.

Rhythm flows through my body.Dancing takes over my mind.Standing straight, I point my toes, turn out.Ribbons of my pointe shoes zigzag across my ankle.I am graceful and dazzling.

The audience makes me wonder.I finger the tulle of my costume.Music starts, I hold my breath.Curtain rising, show starting,I spin and leap across the stage,dance my heart out.Applause, applause, I smile and sigh.I am graceful and dazzling.

—Casey Lum

Hearts on the road

The empty hangers were bonelike and coldShe dropped her cigarette in the dirtShe would get new nice things; the old ones had been sold.

Her scuffed tap shoes left hearts on the roadHer cheeks were slapped the color of hurtThe empty hangers were bonelike and cold.

She was leaving to go to the worldWith bruised elbows and one clean shirtShe would get new nice things; the old ones had been sold.

In Los Angeles, she had been toldYou could get rich by being a flirtThe empty hangers were bonelike and cold

Her scuffed tap shoes left hearts on the roadShe would wear lipstick and scrub at her shirtShe would get new nice things; the old ones had been sold.

The bright lights would make her boldCover her scabs and shorten her skirt The empty hangers were bonelike and cold She would get new nice things; the old ones had been sold.

—Ellie Ridge

SAMPLe Bio:

alex smith attends fourth grade at B.f.f. elementary school in sacramento, and he enjoys baking cupcakes, walking dogs and playing soccer.CASey LuM enjoys ballet, soccer, and music. She is an active member of National Charity League

and values academics and inner beauty. Casey loves words and competes in spelling bees and national Scrabble tournaments.

eLLie riDGe is a fifteen-year-old student from Berkeley, CA.

SpC Monday, auGust 1CAMille roy, dAve boleS & bill gAiner hosted By tRina dRotaR

Medusa’s KitchenDaily news from the Snakepit of Rattlesnake Press (poetry with fangs!) and the cauldron that boils over with the rich poetry stew that is Northern California.

http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com


ContributorS

❍ $30 Standard Membership for an individual❍ $45 Family/Household ❍ $75 Contributing❍ $15 Fixed Income Membership for an individual ❍ $100 Supporting Membership for an individual or members of the same household, with our special thanks for your generous support.

Your Name

other household members

address

CitY/state/Zip

phoNe

e-mail

Make check payable to: The Sacramento Poetry Center n Mail to: 1719 25th Street, Sacramento, CA 95816

become a Sacramento poetry Center member!

KAte CAMPbeLL lives in Sacramento where she tends her garden; practices yoga; dabbles in the arts and enjoys the outdoors. She holds a journalism degree from San Francisco State University, works as a writer, editor and pho-tographer, and is a member of the Squaw Val-ley Community of Writers. Visit her online at kate-Campbell.blogspot.com.

LinDA CoLLinS’ poetry has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion website, as well as in Sacramento area publications. She is co-editor of the Sacramento Poetry Center’s Tule Review, and resides in Carmichael, CA.

SHADi Gex lives and writes in the Bay Area. Her writing has been published in Calaveras Station, Poetry Now, and The Suisun Valley Review. Currently, Shadi serves as poetry editor and copy editor for Poetry Now and is the social network publicist for Sacramento Poetry Center.

MArCeLo HernAnDeZ CAStiLLo is poetry editor for Calaveras Station and an undergradu-ate student at CSUS where he has won numer-ous awards. His works appear in Carcinogenic Poetry, The Legendary, Sex and Murder Magazine, Softblow Review, among others. He lives and works as a handyman in Yuba City, California, and is recently engaged.

PAtriCiA KiLLeLeA is currently a doctoral student in Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis. Originally from the Bay Area, CA, she holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UCD.

ALLiSon Moen has a master’s degree in Eng-lish/Creative Writing from CSU Sacramento and is an assistant poetry editor for Narrative magazine. She currently works full-time as an editor in San Diego.

Ann WeHrMAn’S writing has appeared in print and online journals including Calaveras Station, Medusa’s Kitchen, The Ophidian, Rattlesnake Review, and Poetry Now. Her first chapbook will be published June 2011 by Rattlesnake Press. Ann teaches writing at American River College and online for Axia College/University of Phoenix.

oLarge selection

of poetry & literature!

the book collector1008 24th St. • Sacramento

used books

First cutting, near Colusa

This sky is unmistakable. Not lurid, not low, but black. It’s my own bruised dome, clouds haplessly folding into torrents overhead. Beneath this ominous cover, fields flatten to mountain edges, carry first harvest on furrowed backs, green alfalfa, sweet from mowing, slashed and humped in windrows. Careless, I stand among piles of fresh innocence cut down before flowering lavender blue, waiting for wheels, and hands, plaid-shirted men filling their arms, intent, rushing. I stand and welcome the coastal mountains, greet the clouds bellied with storm and root for the doers and the day emerging: they grasp this moment, love or go down fighting.

The sky a torrent before our eyes, offers hardly a moment’s pause to stand and face this gathering howl, each to honor again what power shines beyond the storm.

—Kate Campbell

returning For Spring And SuMMerPoetry in the Gardenreturns on May 12 with Amy Champ. (u.C. davis arboretum) 12-1 p.m., wyatt deck (if rain, foster Room, Myer hall) hosted by Rebecca Morrison,

Hot Poetry in the Park returns May 16 with a chapbook release by Vincent Kobelt (fremont Park) 7pm. hosted by Rebecca Morrison.


NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONU.S. POSTAGE PAIDSACRAMENTO, CA

PERMIT NUMBER 1956

POETRY NOWTHE POET TREE, INC.1719 25TH STREETSACRAMENTO, CA 95816

The Poet Tree, Inc., also known as The Sacramento Poetry Center, is a non-profit corporation dedicated to providing forums for local poets—including publications, workshops, and a reading series.

sPc

third thurSdAybrown bAg lunCh SerieSHosted by mary Zeppa and Lawrence Dinkins.noon. Central Library, 828 I Street. Sacramento

The Sacramento Poetry Center presents

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Bill G

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Pistachios & black coffee: Charles Plymell in SacramentoA

fter a long absence, poet, publisher and artist Charles Plym

ell returned to San Francisco in M

ay to read poetry in the town he once called hom

e—and w

here this underground, sm

all press publisher once roomed w

ith Allen G

insberg and N

eal Cassidy. A

few days before his reading on M

ay 22 at the Reader’s C

afé &

Bookstore, C

harles paid a visit to Sacramento—

via motorcycle w

ith sidecar, legend has it—

delivered by poet and fellow sm

all press publisher Dave B

oles to a sm

all press fandango with local poets (pictured above) at T

he Book C

ollector. A

round a table cluttered with pistachio shells and cups of strong black coffee the

poets palavered for two hours before heading off to lunch at H

amburger G

ary’s.

poetry now - may/june 2011

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