poetry now - july / august 2010

JULY / AUGUST 2010 | POETRY NOW | 1WWW.SACRAMENTOPOETRYCENTER.ORG

POETRYNOW

Sacramento Poetry CenterSPC

JULY-AUGUST 2010

IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS (clockwise) Sandra Senne, C.E. Chaffin, Allegra Silberstein, Elsie the Poetry Bomb, Christopher Buckley, NSAA and Christian DeWild Band (at the R25 event), S.A. Griffin and Bob Stanley, Lorraine Perrotta, and Gene Bloom.

Free | An interview with Robin Ekiss | Margaret Hoehn’s new book reviewed

LINES FOR QIn a special four page section, fellow poets pay tribute to Quinton Duval, who many knew simply as Q, a talented poet with a generous spirit.

featuring

MARY BETH

ASARO

LAURA BAUMANN

ROBIN EKISS

TAYLOR

GRAHAM

BAXTER JACKSON

KIT

KNIGHT

JOHN P.

KRISTOFCO

LYN LIFSHIN

GARY

LUNDY

MICHAEL S. MORRIS

JOYCE

ODAM

DIANE WEBSTER

ANN WEHRMAN

A.D.

WINANS

AMANDA WYNN

THINGS ARE HAPPENING AT THE POETRY CENTER!

2 | POETRY NOW | JULY / AUGUST 2010 A PUBLICATION OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER

Quinton Duval helped me get my first teaching job. One night before a reading, I told him that I had just graduated and was looking for teaching positions, not expecting a response. “We’ve got an opening at Solano College,” he offered. “Call this number and talk to Kathy.” A week later, after a brief chat with Kathy (the dean), I had three morning classes and my first teaching assignment. Between classes, that first semester, I chatted with Quinton in his cozy, full-of-books office. He lent me books, and we’d talk about poetry, teaching, writing, and music. “Q” somehow balanced the hectic life of a teacher with the calmness of a poet-philosopher.

Frank Graham hosted S.A. Griffin’s Poetry Bomb and reading in May, and a dozen Sacramento poets added their poems to the collection. According to S.A’s wife, Sacramento was one of the best crowds they had on the 8,000 mile tour. The First Wednesday reading in June featured Sue Thomas, Paco Marquez, Sandy Thomas, and Trina Drotar. More than thirty people attended this reading. Special thanks to Robert Foster and Amanda Graham for allowing the use of this space. The next First Wednesday reading (July 7) will be a special Quinton Open Mic Memorial Reading beginning at 6p.m.

Upcoming readings include: Emmanuel hosts the release of Tiger’s Eye on July 12. Third Thursday on July 15 in The Sacramento Room. Frank Graham’s Sactown Poetry Bands on July 19. Tim Kahl hosts Rob Schlegel and Dorine Jennette on July 26th. Tule Review will be available this summer, and the reading has been scheduled for August 2. For updated information and complete details, please check our website, our Facebook Group page, or sign up for the weekly reminder email by sending your name and email to [email protected].

Thanks to Danyen Powell, this will be our first full summer with ceiling insulation at our space. Can you believe we’ve been there five years? Danyen was instrumental in constructing the new fence around the R25 space. “Good fences build good neighbors,” said Frost. Up until now, I always thought that was a xenophobic line. Our whole complex is transformed. Good fences build good arts communities, and the groups at R25 came together on the weekend of June 5 and 6 to celebrate not only the new fence, but music, art, theater, and poetry in the first R25 Crossroads Festival. Come on by 25th and R — Monday nights at 7:30!

Bob

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

BOB STANLEY

POETRYNOW

EDITOR: Trina Drotar

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR: Emmanuel Sigauke

INTERVIEW EDITOR: Lisa Jones

INTERVIEW CONTRIBUTOR: Dorine Jennette

POETRY EDITOR: Cynthia Linville

STAFF: Linda Collins, Sandra Senne

DESIGN/PRODUCTION: Richard Hansen

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Frank Graham

THE POET TREE, also known as the Sacramento Poetry Center, is a non-profit corporation dedicated to providing forums for local poets—including pub-lications (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 AscheBrad BuchananLinda CollinsLawrence Dinkins, Jr.Trina L. DrotarCONTACT 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, re-views, and other work of interest to the Sacramento poetry community are welcome. Note that work submitted may also appear on the SPC website.

POEM SUBMISSIONSSubmit poems and a 30-50 word bio to Cynthia Linville: [email protected]. Electronic sub-missions preferred. Submissions may be mailed. Send with an SASE to address below.

DISTRIBUTIONPOETRY 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.

Paco MarquezTheresa McCourtRebecca MorrisonJonathan SchoutenMary Zeppa

SPC

“Q” somehow balanced the hectic life of a teacher with the calmness of a poet-philosopher.


The Poetry Center’s literary journal has a new look and new editors. Now perfect bound with a full color cover, the current issue, edited by Linda Collins and Theresa McCourt, features 38 poets. Tule Review is published twice yearly and is sent free to all members of the Poetry Center (one of the many good reasons to join now!) The Summer 2010 issue will debut at a Monday Evening Reading on August 2nd at the Poetry Center. See the website for more details.

Summer/Fall 2010

Poetry Workshops

with Bob Stanley, John

Allen Cann, and Julia

Connor began May 27

and continue through

Nov. 2 in the Rancho

Cordova, Southgate, Belle

Cooledge, and Valley Hi /

Laguna libraries, and the

Poetry Center. Check the

SPC website for details.

n n n

SPC is now on Facebook.

Join our Group Page!

n n n

Congratulations to Lisa

Jones and Marcelo

Hernandez for being

accepted into the Squaw

Valley Writer’s Conference.

n n n

Congratulations to Carol

Louise Moon for her

many recent awards.

n n n

SPC celebrates the

release of Tiger’s Eye

with a reading on July 12

featuring Joyce Odam,

Gordan Preston, Laura

LeHew, Cleo Griffith, Tom

Goff, and Karen Clausel

n n n

Get Poetry Now by PDF

instead of a print copy.

Send your name and email

to poetrynoweditor@

gmail.com.

n n n

Get email announcements

of SPC readings and

events, Send your name

and email to tnklbnny@

frontiernet.net.

Some of the upcoming Monday

Night readings hosted by the

Poetry Center

Monday, July 12

Tiger’s Eye Release Reading

Monday, July 19

Patrick Grizzell, Mario Ellis Hill,

James Israel, Jackson Griffith,

Robert Grossklaus, Jennifer &

Michael Pickering

Monday, August 2

Tule Review Reading

Monday, August 23

Shawn Pittard, Christina

Hutchins, Gregory Randall,

Toni Wilkes, Roy Mash &

Mary Petrosky

See the SPC website for more details

POETRY NEWS

Discounts on UC Davis Extension writing courses

SPC members now receive a special 10% discount on all UC Davis Extension writing courses! For more information, go to the SPC website or call (800) 752-0881.

Special thanks to the contributors for their poems and remembrances of Quinton. Each contributor graciously agreed to waive the pub-lishing of their bio in order to accommodate all of the poems honoring Quinton Duval.

Our next issue will feature a new section on small presses and local authors. This will be a continuing feature, and I would like to hear from those of you who run small presses or have new publications out by small presses, as well as awards local authors and/or books have received. If you have a book you’d like us to consider reviewing, please contact the editor. If you know of any special readings or poetry-related events/news, please forward the information to the editor for inclusion in the next issue. The deadline will be August 5, 2010.

The editor has a new email address: [email protected]. This is not for poetry submissions. That email remains the same. The Sacramento Poetry Center has a new email address for general inquiries: [email protected].

Many thanks to all of the people who worked so hard on this issue.

Trina—Trina L. Drotar’s email: [email protected].

EDITOR’S MESSAGE

TRINA L. DROTAR

SPC Poets’ WorkshopEvery TuesdayTime: 7:30pm to 9pmLocation: Hart Senior Center Facilitator: Danyen PowellContact: (530) 756-6228Cost: Free

The SPC website is updated weekly, and you’ll find information about The Sacramento Poem (submission deadline December 1, 2010), the SPC Poetry Contest (submission deadline July 15, 2010), upcoming events, and past events, among other items.

Tule Review Summer 2010 Issue now available


POEMS

SKATING THE TABLEBy Laura Baumann

The meeting dragged by,in tedious monotony,so I decided to figure skateacross the conference table.

My suit dropped off, revealing a skating dressof glittering purple sequins-my hair, a crafted updo, complete with jeweled tiara.

Weaving among coffee mugsand agendas, I flowed like a graceful ballerina, untilknocking over a diet soda.

Deciding a toe loop would impress them, I jabbed my toe pick into the icy table,vaulting into the air.

My coworkers began scoring from 1 to 10 on skill, transitions, choreography,performance, and artistry.

Then came the axel —the only jump you take off on going forward. I made sure to smileat a stern faced judge.

Finally a loop jump,with the sensation of falling overbackwards on my head.Hate to brag, but I nailed it!

DRIVING THE PIANOBy Laura Baumann

Lynn and I couldn’t wait to be teenagers. We borrowed purses and car keys to take turns driving the piano like a bright red Mustang convertible. We couldn’t imagine kissing the stupid boys at school. We pictured tan lifeguards and boys in bands, with feathered hair, like the ones in Tiger Beat. Lynn and I tried on red lipstick and blue eye shadow while wobbling in oversized black heels. We sang loudly to the Captain and Tennille, fluffing up our Farrah- Fawcett-hair.

ANCIENT CHINESE CURSEBy Laura Baumann

Three Chinese curses of increasing severity:

• May you live in interesting times

• May you come to the attention of those in authority

• May you find what you are looking for

An ancient Chinese curse reads May you live in interesting times but already I have had enough drama in this life. Jinx me that I may knowthe trials and tribulations of three months’ salary worth of emergency savings.

Afflict me with the calamity of well funded and diversified401Ks and Roth IRAs. Plague me with the scourge of a forty-year-long loving, monogamous relationship.

THE THIRD EYE OF ISLAM By Baxter Jackson Zabeeba Zawhat? Za-bee-ba Say it again: za-bee-ba What can it be? What does it mean? It sounds vaguely obscene Found all over the Middle East, in every season In Arabic, it actually means raisin Don’t look for it in the supermarkets though, you’re more likely to see it on the metro than you are in Toledo, Ohio 5 doses a day of religious inculcation plus years of Islamic prostration equals epidermal accumulation On a Muslim man’s head, a callous is like a key to the heavenly palace brought about by the notion of social devotion and awarded with communal deference and general reverence Small wonder some fake it till they make it with just sandpaper and soot the payoff is huge and hey, the mark is cool to boot Zabeeba

NOUNS/VERBSBy John P. Kristofco

lovers love and liars lie,earth receives the rainlike world absorbs the words we speak,our tongues,the air we take and give;it is a simple syntax, in the end:dust to dust,ashes to ashes;from and to us nounsour verb form dashes

THUNDERSTORM AT NIGHTBy Diane WebsterEven through closed, sleeping eyeslightning impresses like flashbulb snapmeant to freeze the momentuntil thunder rattles, loosens, scatterseverything mobile jumps in frightlike the cat sleeping at my feetjumps a chain reaction through melike touching electricityso after the next lightning flashI whisper, “Here comes another one,”as if she didn’t see and knowthe next crashing blow in one, two,three seconds…nowtraveling farther way in rippleslike dreams snuggling us deeperbeneath protective blankets.


BOOK REVIEWFIVE PRAYERS OF APPLES is an inspiring collection of beautifully crafted poems. The poet encourages us to see hope in the least expected places, even in broken glass. The collection starts with the poem “What Softly Calls Back,” which reminds us that “the world reaches out / to comfort itself.” This search for comfort, the need to register a presence, is not a passive one. The poet tells us that “even the parts we thought / were mute are more poem / than we could have imagined.” It’s the complexity of life often disguised by plainness and unpredictability. All things around us, trees, grass, rocks, birds, are full of this richness of life; they sing it, whether we pay attention or not, but in not paying attention we lose out on a lot that would enrich us.

Important messages about life are everywhere, even in the language of our wounds or in “those long / silences that we have endured,” which are not silences, but “psalms and blessings / and offerings of encouragement / and hope.” All we need to do is learn to hear what silence is telling us. When we reach this point of hearing the inaudible, of seeking sound where silence rules, we will be closer to discovering the hope that abounds around us.

In “The Topography of Motion,” the poet tells us that motion always tells a story. Any form of movement is important as it goes hand in hand with change. Life is motion. To live is to be in a constant state of movement, and it doesn’t matter whether the movement is a going (somewhere) or a return. Departure becomes indistinguishable from arrival. Even memory is in a constant state of transformation; what matters is that the motion continues to “chime” and every moment is “a bird/already flying beyond reach.” Here we see the consistency of movement, and the deeper concentration needed to decipher the movements that imitate the beat of life, whose progression like that of the seasons, forever departing, but always returning.

These poems celebrate life, whose manifestation is sometimes seen through even the most fragmentary piece of evidence and various “intricate puzzle[s].” The world demands that we constantly fit the puzzles of our lives together. Perhaps this task should make us appreciate life more, and ,as the poet does, “by will alone…make this exquisite, / fractured world almost whole.” Of course, there is no perfection, but there is the satisfaction that the episodes of life we have so far puzzled together help us desire more puzzles which come as hours, days, months, years. That, the poet seems to be saying, is the ultimate appreciation of life.

This is not even a romanticized view of life, but an honest message about what it means to be human, and to be alive, this process in which we should be willing to “drown in the sadness and beauty of this world / in order to live.” In “Travelling without a Map,” one of my favorite poems in the collection, the persona ponders about the nature of human relationships, remembered in the context of travel. A physical journey remembered parallels the emotional journey in the persona’s personal relationship. Even though the couple inhabits different and increasingly divergent emotional plains, the persona realizes that

sometimes in travelling, it is often difficult to separate departure from arrival. After a while, it does not matter whether one is arriving or departing because these two “can flow / side by side without touching / as they leave each other behind.” This poem reconnects to the idea of how silence can draw two people closer to each other, thereby helping them achieve emotional reunification.

These poems are full of hope, reminding us to pay attention to the objects we often ignore, which might enrich our understanding of life. The message is written in everything around us, how the random spill of apples from a torn grocery bag can lead to thoughts of “the sudden / and ordinary way that beauty / or loss appears in our lives.” Even artists like Cezanne (invoked in the title poem) have

always deciphered these subliminal messages from simple, almost invisible objects. The poet here asks if loneliness allowed the artist to hear the stories of apples, stories of “gratitude and despair.” Triggered by the loss of rotting apples, the art of Cezanne, as celebrated by the poet, was a search of beauty so intense that also it sought to make time stand still, or to “stop the world from turning,” to help an epiphany reveal itself. I detect in these poems the need to take a more active role in the making of meaning in order to understand our world.

I enjoyed these poems, which are full of music. On the page they simple, but as you reread, because they are rendered beautifully, you are taken to a higher level of thinking. This simplicity is not even deceptive, it doesn’t desire to be, but it is something deliberate, something meant to lift you to a higher level of understanding, or if no new understanding is attained, at least to a new way of thinking about apples, silence, shadows, darkness, travel, relationships, and rivers. Margaret Hoehn is a gentle philosopher, raising questions, answering them, and raising more and not answering them.

REVIEWED BY EMMANUEL SIGAUKE

Five Prayers of Apples by Margaret HoehnSpire Press, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-934828-07-6


AMANADA SABOURIN, 1945BAMs & HAMsBy Kit Knight

As soon as women came intothe Marines, the men devisedtheir own “cute” nicknames.We expected that—what mancares for women as a groupanyway? When one of the menwould call me a BAM, Big AssMarine, I’d respond, “And you’rea HAM, the H stands forHalf.”

6 AM POEMBy A.D. Winans

Lying here alone in bedA gnawing hunger in my bellySoon I’ll take my aching bonesTo the kitchen tableTake my morning dose of pillsSad there is no woman to put themNext to my morning cereal

CALLING “SPIRIT”By Taylor Graham

If I could, I’d dial your number, Rover. But you’re stuck in a sand-trap out there on Mars. I’d like to ask about your view. What does a Warrior Planet think about our embattled earth? Not Earth herself, but her children- earthlings swarming all over her globe, causing mischief. You may be stuck in sand, but I doubt there are minefields on Mars. I’d like to talk to you, Spirit, but you’re out of service; solar panels tilted to gather power in a Martian winter. Shall we tilt our earthly panels sun-ward and talk to the heavens instead of bickering among ourselves?

ONE OF NIGHT’S DARK STORIESBy Joyce Odam

After dark, whenstreet lights come on, tree shadows danceagainstwalls—becomepictographs, shadow-murals on night’sgrim buildingswhose wallsare made beautifulby this—and sidewalks try to hold the treesfrom pulling through their circles.

SPEAKING IN BLOODBy Joyce Odam

The words are all red this morning, red for love, and lack of love, and for the word itself. Look how intensethey appear on the page—shaped like that—awkward like that,meaning what they mean,even as they question what they mean. Howfierce they are,as if to win by their very boldness—their red persuasion.

THIS RANGE OF SEEINGBy Joyce Odam

I remember stars in the black night. But who can count the memory of that many stars?

I use the abstract words: millions,billions, but do not know how many this is.

I am that tiny child-speck, dizzy fromlooking up into the sky from the sidewalk:

sounds hushed, the chanting of the other children fading into a thin ringing of voices:

I am lifting into the sky, dizzy with seeing. I am a slow twirl of wonder . . . so many stars.

ENTER THE DELUGEBy Ann Wehrman

tell you howentire continents universes of light and darkness mass through one sideof my mind out the otherraven laughs, hunts,has seen such changescome to nothing beforecome to thisconcrete belowwelcome the sands concrete poursthrough my headlava, earthquake, tsunamigreat rolling waves green-white water shards of shellfish in my mouthpour out through every orificedrain and fill me chunks of timeweeds of your hairtangle in mineyour scent mixeswith salt, turns to tears choke onthis changeyou and meno time to thinkit all throughthe next wave is upon usI vanish within

A KISSBy Ann Wehrman

I am so smallI can live under your collarin your pocket or your hairdo you want to get rid of me,or would you want me there?

POEMS


LINES FOR Q By V. Dalkey

The first night you were in the hospitalI woke humming “The Nearness of You”a Hoagy Carmichael song of courseone you would know and loveand I thought of you lying illand wished myself there with youholding your hand and humming – “It isn’t your sweet conversationThat brings this sensation, oh noIt’s just the nearness of you” –a song as simple and intimateas the ones you wroteto touch us and cheer uson dark nights when we are aloneand longing for your company.And now you are the songwe all sing when we’re going to sleepflashing in our minds like the red wingsof the small blackbirds you loved.

LINES FOR Q: POETS REMEMBER QUINTON DUVAL

My Remembrance of Quinton Duval by Victoria Dalkey

For the last five years, I have had the pleasure to be included in a group of eight poets who meet every four to six weeks to discuss a book we have all read, break bread, and share poems we have worked on from assignments by members of the group. Quinton Duval was the heart and soul of the group, the one who was sure to bring an astonishing poem that was much more than a first draft. He was the only man in the group, but we never felt we had to defer to him nor did he ever treat us as anything but equals. He kept us on track when we got off on tangents, and he always called our leader, Kathleen Lynch, before the meeting to make sure that someone would bring a protein. Quinton would bring homemade dishes, and they were always delicious. He fed our stomachs and our souls. He was our song bird and every poem he wrote was, as his beloved wife Nancy said, a love poem. We miss him terribly and no one will ever be able to take his place in our hearts.

DISLOCATIONSBy Carol Frith

Time and time’s dislocations,flowing silent and enclosed, dark wine in an underground river.

It takes decades to remember.I’m out of energy today:time and time’s dislocations.

My neighbor’s grape-coloredrhododendron is shedding light—Lenten color, flowing in a river

through the afternoon. So manypurples in half-hearted sunlight,time and its dislocations

almost audible in the heavy air.I think I’ll stay inside. Burgundy light flows like a slow river

through this season: mingledwines of blended sorrow, of time and its dislocations:dark wine flowing like a river.

Poets in photo, from left to right: Carol Frith, Susan Kelly-Dewitt, Mary Zeppa, Kathleen Lynch, Cathy French, Lisa Dominguez Abraham, Quinton Duval, Victoria Dalkey. Photo by Fred Dalkey.

CONTRIBUTORS LISA ABRAHAM • KATY BROWN

VICTORIA DALKEY CATHERINE FRENCH

CAROL FRITH • SHADI GEX CINDY HURN

SUSAN KELLY-DEWITTKATHLEEN LYNCH

DENNIS SCHMITZ • MARY ZEPPA


LETTER TO Q, MAY 17, 2010 By Susan Kelly-DeWitt

…a piece of the continent/ A part of the main… --John Donne

Dear Q,

This morning our feisty little dazzler of a hummingbird dropped by, with the thrum and whirr of those posh

jade wings, and that off-kilter boutonniere of shy ruby.

Then the local host, aerialist and stickler for tunes, Mr. Mockingbird, started in a cappella; so of course

I thought of you, and that virtuoso gang of old choristers, who

by now you must have found. I picture the lot of you crowded around some infinite campfire’s galactic blaze,

hoisting a few glasses of otherworld wine, as you cook up that dreamy asparagus

and potato number you nonchalantly served us a few months back. Even a body without a body as we know it will zero in on

certain basic constellations—to eat and drink whatever is

offered, of fellowship, good wine, asparagus, and stars. (As you would say, it’s all nectar.) So I know you’ll stab anything and everything you can

with that strange new beakof invisible heart. You’ll stir it up,

heat it to boiling, and write a few more great recipes for song.

DIVINING BY CLOUD, ANGEL, FLOWER By Mary Zeppa

Spy the cloud in the shape of Q’s quarter moon. Spy the silver-blue, fit-for-kings cloud.

Spy King Q the First in his chariot, drawn by oxen as blue as their blood.

* Such angels as I knew left me bemused, limp by the side of the road. Q knew them all, knew the names of their dogs, ran with the heavenly crowd.

* Flower by the river road, wild-river flower crushed by the heel of a child rescued by Q for his buttonhole. Hand-to-hand combat with God.

A POET’S DAYS By Katy Brown

for Quinton Duval

He wrote his appointments in a calendarfilled with poems and photographs.The days were crossed off until today.

On this day his heart stopped beating:the poems he imagined, still undrafted.He wrote reminders in his calendar

for doctor’s visits, birthdays, anniversaries.He had plans for next week.He’d crossed off the days before today,

marking time on a poet’s calendar.He did not circle the day he learned his diagnosis:he had made an appointment with Charon

written in invisible ink.All we knew was that his days were limited:he marked them off with red X’s.

All of his language and learning and skill―all silent now: gone with him into the void.He wrote his appointments in a calendarand crossed off the days he had lived.

LINES FOR Q

Humans should sing the way birds do—with all of their being, affirming even in their entreaties. Life is provisional but is all the time. Quinton’s poems sing in that way. Quinton was rare for his equanimity, and in his poems, for his ability to sort our emotional intricacies. His poems love dailiness, all its nuances, its romances and forfeits. Beautiful poems that we’ll keep because they keep us.

—Dennis Schmitz


DIVINING BY CLOUD, ANGEL, FLOWER By Mary Zeppa

Spy the cloud in the shape of Q’s quarter moon. Spy the silver-blue, fit-for-kings cloud.

Spy King Q the First in his chariot, drawn by oxen as blue as their blood.

* Such angels as I knew left me bemused, limp by the side of the road. Q knew them all, knew the names of their dogs, ran with the heavenly crowd.

* Flower by the river road, wild-river flower crushed by the heel of a child rescued by Q for his buttonhole. Hand-to-hand combat with God.

FULLY ALIVE By Kathleen Lynch for Quinton

Today I loved everybody. Not in the genericI’m-a-good-person way, but actually. Acutely.I loved the baby-faced dentist as he lowered the air-drill burr into my mouth to grind away uneven tips of my molars.

The grating whirr made enamel dust puffs float like winter breath, rise, evaporate. More of medisappearing, I thought… then feared, what if the soul is in the teeth, but my mind, which alwayschats me up, even on idle, countered, No. More people lose their teeth than their souls. This is the most fully alive I’ve felt since you left.

I loved the beaming receptionist who also handles X-rays, and loved, as I passed her room, young Zosha who usually cleans my teeth,bent over another patient. She never looked up from her task, intent on her thorough tendering.

When leaving the parking lot, I loved the semi-Asian, semi-blind old man who tapped his wayto the alley’s edge and waited as I exited. I hadn’t seen him behind the shrub, but he stood, safe,all his remaining senses attuned. I loved the ragbag woman at the corner, filthy, wrecked, talking loudly to no one, though maybe she sawa compassionate listener I could not detect.

I love the birches outside my window. In a way, I think of them as people, bending to every weather. Lately, when they are smitten with glisters of rain, I speak your name aloud in my silent room.

Most of all, I love the mirage people, those who closely resemble you. When I see them, I think… Oh! Then… oh. They crop up everywhere now—bus stops, restaurants, grocery aisles. This is the new mystery of you—being “gone” yet achingly present.I count that among your many gifts to us: poems,love, great laughter—things that abide. Like the sound of your name—that particular, cherished song.

DEATH OF A LEMON TREE By Catherine French

for Q

The same March frost that took the last lurid spectrum of lemons, also found the tree’s hidden heartTook that too.

Overnight, it turned, Weakening as I slept, then raced through the petty pace of day and night, each hour the exact likenessof a lemon, solid rind with longing beneath slowly rising to full sour song. Reality’s a hell-bitch. And a Wonder.

Every year for 40 odd yearsits bright and bitter precepts translated first to bud, then to fruit, channeling cold stardust, mud and sun to that simple shape.

Which we feasted on. Which we pressed in our fists hard as we could to taste its joyous bite. Beastly and supreme answer to the Nothing. And I took what it gave,Loved how my fingers burned from its motherlode, how fragrance blesses skin,how its clear wash of severity stung where the barbed branches scratched.

That damning frost whispered so quietly that I woke late to find its branches stripped, the quick gone, only brittle silhouette left.Which will need to come down, every spiked branch. The muscled trunk, too, will separate from the ground it fed and took from. (stanza break)

But not yet. Stay – Consider your fractious limbsCleared now from their work ,Their tireless gleaning of thin air.Stay here a while before you disappear into evening. Stay and trace the shape of what you were tangled outline: Thicket of barbs, restrained riot of woodthat modestly offered neatly contained rebellions of hard light.

QUINTON DUVAL REMEMBERED


TWENTY WORDS – POETRY WORKSHOP WITH QUINTON DUVAL By Cindy Hurn

Take a moment to listen between the missing lines. Hear your heart as the beats count down, pulsing under scars that whisperI’m still here.

Are you really, deeply listening?Through cracked pane of window glassthe clang, clang of train rumbles pastin competition and your mind chases the iron tracks.

Scratching pens on poets’ padsa cough, a sigh, a noisy worry;a tall red drum rests in the corner silent.Yet even that - the lack of drumming, distracts.

Take a moment and relax.Can you hear those ten words or better, twenty?The ones that if you had to chooseyou could not live without?

Now - Focus.Jot them down quickly.Don’t judge them; let them falllike scattered cells of finished skin

children, laughter, thunder, rain, mountain, feathers, silver bark, lovers, sunlight, autumn, meadows, spring, elk, green, dog, blue, horse, gold, stream

QUINTONLAND By Lisa Dominguez Abraham

Parachute silks rustle and fold as you thump down.Weight them with a rock, no need to recycle here. Follow mariachi music down the hillthrough crazy yellow field mustard. A woman gathering warm laundry from the line will see you passand abandon her chore, placing shirts in a wicker basketthen smoothing her hair. A fisherman will fold his string of trout into an ice chest and walk to meet you, offering you a swigfrom his thermos of whiskey and hot tea.

They heard you were coming. Main Street is festoonedwith crepe paper flowers and a fragrant mole simmers on someone’s stove. The town folk are setting uppicnic tables in the city park, telling jokes as their missteps and regrets from the other worldfall away. What matters is your arrival,strolling to the tune of guitars and birdsongas everyone stands—the orphan, the shepherd,the mariner—all with glasses of chilled wineraised to toast your safe landing.

CIRCLE, FOR QUINTON

By Shadi Gex

1983.You walked into a classroom,unknown voices, uncertain words.Soft spoken, gentle humor,you sifted through layers of our lives.

Scrapes of metal legs on tile,desks rearranged,forming the pattern of our semester and our lives.

Sitting in a circle,we read poems of our beginnings,hearts beating too fast,skipping beats in time.

No pretension, just intentionto journey with us,allowing ears to see the way words work to form patternsin our lives.

You saw beauty in my memory.“Write,” you said, “just write.”Keep looking for momentsthat mean morethan just this circle,just here, just now,our fragile moment in time.

And so I have.Your circle ever widens.


Interviewed by Dorine Jennette

JENNETTE: The last time I saw you, you were within a few weeks of the birth of your first child, and you were joking that you might have to reconsider all the mothering poems in The Mansion of Happiness very soon, once you had entered the next phase of mothering yourself. I know it would be silly to ask you to commit to some specific baby-era aesthetic, but do you have any preliminary thoughts on any changes to your work, now that you are a parent? Do you feel yourself approaching poems differently at all?

EKISS: It’s all so new, I can’t say for sure how having a child is going to change the work at this stage. But I do know that it’s already changed my thinking dramatically. I find myself looking at my son when he’s asleep and thinking even more about my own mortality, knowing he’ll outlive me in a way I thought only my poems could. Instead of being reassuring, I find this incredibly terrifying. And once I’m able to get some sleep myself, I may actually be able to write a poem that goes there, that is, when I can find time to write. Having a baby has destroyed any illusion I had that I was in control, and has completely wreaked havoc on my ability to focus. They say it gets easier, and I’m banking on that!

JENNETTE: Speaking of the artist and mortality, if what you write or invent outlasts you, other people can write about it—and about you. Or they can reference you as a way to write about other things. Your collection The Mansion of Happiness, for example, features poems like “Edison in Love” and “Portrait of Houdini with Wife.” Such poems strike me as exceedingly difficult to write—I find that many poems that attempt an intimate position with respect to a high-profile figure achieve only a sense of intrusion. Yet you seem to have the knack of

ROBIN EKISS on THE MANSION OF HAPPINESS

THE POETRY OF ROBIN EKISS INTERTWINES PRESENT-DAY DOMESTIC LIFE WITH OBJECTS, PERSONALITIES, AND OBSESSIONS FROM THE PAST.

Ekiss ruminates on a doll’s eyeball caught in a floorboard crack and on strained mother-daughter relationships, on the body’s frailties and the origins of moving pictures. Ekiss imagines her way inside Houdini’s marriage, inside Descartes’s train compartment, inside doll houses and bird cages and the littlest whirling gears of time. Fascinated by the disjecta of history and the little hitches of circumstances that attach the past to the present, Ekiss writes everything from intricate music-box lyrics to extended sequences. Her scales vary not only in the sense of space but in the sense of music: Ekiss’s ear for the line is one of her finest gifts.

Robin Ekiss’s poems and prose have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, the Black Warrior Review, VQR, and elsewhere. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers, Ekiss has received grants, awards, and scholarships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her first book of poems, The Mansion of Happiness, was published by the University of Georgia Press VQR Poetry Series.

INTERVIEW


poems that wander into the strange land of the past, and find somewhere there the mind of a friend. Can you speak a bit about your approach to working with that kind of material? To the gap, if you think there is one, between the lives of private people and the later imagining inspired by their works of art and invention?

EKISS: For me, these figures and others like them live entirely in the imagination; while rationally, I know they were real people, with real lives, the “realness” of their lives isn’t at all what interests me, but rather, I’m compelled by the outsized and wholly imagined myth of them. I’m drawn to them as emblems of human experience, finding in them a kind of representation against which to test my own knowledge of the world. I think readers can relate to the temptation of curiosity about others’ inner lives and resources, whether we’re talking about individuals uniquely in our own circles (as is often the case for poets who write from a more overtly “personal” perspective) or about well-known figures from the wider channels of history. That brand of curiosity creates, for me—and I hope, readers—a kind of intimacy with an unknown past. Ultimately, I think the poems say more about my own emotional state and the state of rational, rhetorical thinking than they do about any single person, even ones as compelling as Houdini or Edison. The lore that’s been handed down about these men is often so embellished, it’s inevitably relative . . . just as what we can know about anything is by nature relative.

JENNETTE: Considering myth, emotion, and rational rhetoric together brings me to the question of attentional states, of your craft as a writer in holding and managing the reader’s attention over a long stretch. Composing long sequences, such as the title series “The Mansion of Happiness,” or “The Bones of August,” the long poem that forms the second section of the book, presents real challenges in structure, sustaining momentum, etc. Can you speak to your strategy of sequence assembly?

EKISS: I’m generally a short-distance runner, not a marathoner, but occasionally, the depths of obsession keep me moving forward. I’d say, like writing any other poem, when it comes to more expansive poems, I really don’t have a sense at the beginning that a long poem or a sequence is going to occupy so much mental space (and page space). It generates its own momentum, and is always surprising to me. I often find the hardest part of writing a poem isn’t starting, it’s knowing when to stop, to feel as if I’ve exhausted all the emotional or conceptual territory a given poem is demanding (or am willing to step away

before doing so), and in certain cases (like “The Mansion of Happiness” or “The Bones of August”), I struggle to have the patience to prevent myself from not foreshortening the results. It takes a certain degree of willingness to live in ambiguity to write any poem, and that’s never more true than in writing a long(er) one. I find that piecing it all together isn’t much different for me than when I write short poems: sustaining a thread of logic (or illogic) presents the same challenges no matter what the word count, although understandably, it almost always takes more time to settle.

JENNETTE: I like this idea of obsession as a driving force behind the poems, and it resonates with what many artists say about their working process. I wonder whether you’d be willing to talk a little bit about the specific nature of your artistic obsessions, to describe your experience of the

FOR ME, THE PROCESS OF WRITING A POEM OFTEN STARTS IN DISCONNECTION, OF NOTICING THE UNCANNY

RESONANCES THAT RESULT FROM A CLASH OF SCENARIOS, HISTORIES, PERSONALITIES, IDEAS THAT

MIGHT ON THE SURFACE SEEM FAR REMOVED OR REMOTE FROM EACH OTHER.

Edison in LoveThomas Edison loved a dollwith a tiny phonograph insidebecause he made her speak.

Is there any other reason to love a woman? Did she say the ghost of my conception

or something equally demure?It’s hard to be sure how he feels;when he holds me, I fall apart.

I’m projecting here. He didn’t feel her first transgression was in having no expression.

René Descartes, too, traveled alone with a doll-in-a-boxhe called his daughter. Francine,

Francine… is it better to be silent and wait for everything we were promised?

Or should we love them back, the way a train loves its destination,as if we have the machinery necessary for it?

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ROBIN EKISS POEMproductivity those obsessions push for. For me—just to give you something to bounce off of—the obsession often begins as an image or half a line or a snatch of melody that gets stuck in my head and won’t get out until it gets worked out. Or some feeling that there is a connection between two objects or two ideas, but no idea yet what the connection might be. Then once there’s a draft, the nature of the obsession is along the lines of a puzzle: the poem isn’t working, and I am compelled to tinker with it (or whack at it) until it is working. What are the mechanisms of your artistic obsessions?

EKISS: It’s so interesting to hear you describe your process as being akin to finding the connections; for me, the process of writing a poem often starts in disconnection, of noticing the uncanny resonances that result from a clash of scenarios, histories, personalities, ideas that might on the surface seem far removed or remote from each other. It’s as you say, though: a kind of puzzle that requires concentration to connect the dots, or to acknowledge the disconnections. Poems begin for me, too, in fragments: of language, of circumstance, of phrasing, in images that I find haunting or strangely familiar, though I can’t articulate why, and in how those intermingle and marry with each other, and, especially, in how those spur memory. It’s a fluid association, not always linear or direct, which is the beauty of poetry as a medium: it allows, even thrives, on those sorts of associations. Obsession, for me, is an associative quality, one that drifts, refrains, and returns me again and again to the page.

JENNETTE: I love that idea of obsession as an associative process, vs. obsession with one specific person, place, or thing. Care to leave us with a reading recommendation or two? What’s great that we should know about?

EKISS: There are so many great new books of poetry out there, but a few that are hot off the presses come to mind first, like Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House and Alexandra Teague’s Mortal Geography, or Camille Dungy’s eye-opening anthology of nature poetry by African-American poets, Black Nature. I’m also looking forward to a number of books that are coming out later this year—and should definitely be on everyone’s radar . . . like Dilruba Ahmed’s Dhaka Dust, Rachel Richardson’s Copperhead, and (obviously biased here), my husband’s first book of poems, Keith Ekiss’s Pima Road Notebook. Almost all of these poets write with a consciousness bound to place, something that interests me in the abstract, but rarely governs my own work.

For more about Ekiss’s work and a calendar of upcoming

events, please visit www.robinekiss.com.

Portrait of Houdini with Wife

The pleasure of contrast: not chained up in an oilcloth sack underwater, holding his breath, but composing himself

for the camera, in his only suit. You have to understand photography— unforgiving mirror, unlike oils that soften

the hard edges of a man’s face if you want them to, or velvet curtain shielding the pine box during an escape.

The audience imagines his bones contracting to a splinter. That’s not at all how it’s done—the camera’s lens blanketed by cloth

to keep it in the dark; any halo of light ruptures the film with shadow. His eyes alreadyturn inward to that place we’re going.

She thinks about escape too: at the horse butcher, in line like the others, or arguing over the price of bread

at the Market of Innocents. Adam’s rib is forever hidden inside her chest as the force of blows hibernates in a boxer’s fist,

but she, at least, is smiling when he says, We have such a small family, meaning your body

won’t open to me— it’s shackled inside its cage: love and rage, whose bars are meant to be broke


I SAW HIM ACROSS THE SWANSBy Lyn Lifshin

before I touched him:the Boston Gardens, a freeconcert. Something stayedso at the art retreat — tohave him across the table and later in my bed nearthe octagonal tub seemedunreal. His “Baby Won’t You..”a drug, his fingers on thestrings, foreplay. No matterhis last love said “you mean you think I enjoy this?”and it stung so he wonderedif he could ever again. Those June nights blurbut not the waiting for him,so many women hypnotizedby his blues. I hated cigarsbut for that short timeit didn’t matter. Or the rumhe spilled in my Maverickor Woodstock nights heplayed until dawn, drinkingand hollering and singingand laughing, me the onlyone not a music star —I keep the sketches he didof me like sacred relicsand the one a famouscartoonist did of us together and play his records,feel him singing in the stainedglass room just to me

POEMS

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THE DEVILBy Mary Beth Asaro

You blame mewhen things go wrongand explode up in your face.You curse my namewhen the environment changes,economy burns and buildings leftto crumble.You say I hate youcuz the black book says so.

Truth is I luv yacuz ya just my soul mate.

You love too fastand hate too long.You are an action movieI can’t stop watchin’.You die in your own handswhile I do nothingbut watch.

It was love at first sightwhen I met you. You fightso strongly for your moral,religious principles ‘til you becomeblind by the extinction of everything else.I lust at your methods of making murdera righteous act of God.

I am your Adam.You are my Eve.

No creature has never made mefeel this way like you when I sayI love to watch you pullthe trigger and selfdestruct.

FINALLY LOVEBy Gary Lundy

trek back toward setting sunhow am i to convincethis love that keeps me strandedin the attic awaiting your returni cannot imaginehow difficult our world might have beenhad we not metnor how i managed to forestallloving you for the lost decadetell me what i am to dofear struggles wraps its fingersaround my throatthrows me to the ground unconsciousnever mindi should be writing about important thingsthe attack on the mosque in iraqbut i cannot put myself near theremy skin elopes in wonderat a mere whisper of your shadowpassing across my sleeping body

SHE SMIILEDBy Michael S. Morris

Sometimes my wife steps in the room I look at her as though I remember her in youth when we would hoe gardens and go for rough walks She stops by and I remember a river we jumped into with our clothes on relieved to be HERE! Our love was water beneath a swan floating in the vortexing light of a silver spring mountain moon She says Hi and I usually think: who is she today? Who is this person with her life? She says gotta go for there are meetings volunteer groups, girlfriends, men-friends she says Hi Stranger and hugs me sometimes I don’t recognize my wife. Sometimes she is this person or she is that mother or that daddy’s daughter, or a poet I remember the poet. But not of words She was color surrounded by sunshine wild on gray and spurious mornings


MARY BETH ASARO has been published in The Poet’s Haven, Snow Island Review, and The Furnace Review. She grew up in Darlington, SC, and graduated from Francis Marion University with a BA in English-Liberal Arts and a minor in Creative Writing.

LAURA BAUMANN grew up in Minneapolis, MN. She is an attorney at the CA Secretary of State’s office. Her poetry has been published in Rattlesnake Review and Poetry Now. She’s read her work in the Poetry at the VOX series and participates in the SPC’s Tuesday Poetry Workshop.

TAYLOR GRAHAM’S poems have appeared in numerous journals and in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor, was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She’s a finalist in this year’s Poets & Writers CA Writers Exchange.

BAXTER JACKSON is an English Teacher at the Nizwa College of Applied Sciences in Oman. When he’s not teaching he enjoys exploring his surroundings, traveling in the Middle East, and freelance writing. His work has appeared in Lonely Planet and Matador Travel.

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 the Journal, Coconut, Court Green, Puerto del Sol, and the Georgia Review. She lives in Davis, California.

130 poems in over 60 journals, magazines, and anthologies. His chapbook, A Wink Centuries Old, was featured in Minotaur Magazine (51).

Joyce odam’s most recent chapbooks are Noir Love and Peripherals. Her work has been included in the local anthologies Landing Signals, The Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems, and Watching From The Sky. She is a two-time winner of CFCP Golden Pegasus Award. She now edits Brevities: A Mini-Mag Of Minimalist Poems and has a passion for the relevance of art in one’s life.

diane Webster lives in CO and works in the production department of her local newspaper. Drives in the mountains help rejuvenate her being and help her find ideas for poetry. Her poems have been published in Bellowing Ark, the Aurorean, Icon, and Philadelphia Poets, among others.

ann Wehrman is completing a second BA in Music (Flute) at CSUS, where she earned a MA in English/Creative Writing in 2005. She has published poetry and fiction in small presses and college literary journals, and she served as Poetry Co-Editor for Calaveras Station Literary Journal over the past two years.

a.d. Winans is a widely published poet. His work has been translated into nine languages. In 2006, he won a PEN National Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature. In 2009, PEN Oakland presented him with a lifetime achievement award.

amanda Wynn is a 17-year old senior at Sacramento New Technology High. She has never been published before and is working on her senior project about writing and publishing poetry. Her mentor, Bob Stanley, helped her create and edit poems.

KIT KNIGHT was born in RI, lived in PA, where she attended college, then lived in Citrus Heights. She now lives in the high plains of northern NV. She’s listed in Who’s Who In America.

JOHN P. KRISTOFCO is from Wooster, OH, and is professor of English and dean of Wayne College in Orrville. His poetry and short stories have appeared in over 100 different publications, including Folio, Sojourn, Cimarron Review, and Rattle. He has published one collection of poetry, A Box of Stones, with another, Apparitions, due out soon.

LYN LIFSHIN has published over 120 books including three from Black Sparrow: Cold Comfort, Before it’s Light, and Another Woman Who Looks like Me. She has edited four an-thologies and is the subject of a documen-tary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. Her web site is www.lynlifshin.com, and her most recent book, Katrina, is forthcom-ing from Poetic Matrix Press.

GARY LUNDY is a professor of English at the University of MT Western, in Dillon, MT. His poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Aura Literary Arts Review, Prairie Winds, Timber Creek Review, and The Tule Review. More poems are forthcoming in Parting Gifts, Poetry Flash, Main Street Rag, and Heeltap.

MICHAEL S. MORRIS was born in Waterbury, CT, and is currently a 30-year resident of Sonoma, CA. A painting contractor by day, Michael has written two novels, a book of short stories, and published approximately

CONTRIBUTORS

NON-RELATIONSHIP/RELATIONSHIPBy Amanda Wynn

You’re nothing old and nothing borrowedSomething I’ve never even considered as factA wandering eye across a classroomI’m caught in the look on your face, the little smile you keep there.You play with my hands too long to be an accident,Stare too long to be a mistakeCome to close to drop the gazeStand too close to walk away.My lips have touched your skin but it wasn’t a kiss, my face brushed yours but it wasn’t realYou’ve hugged me so long I felt attached, why aren’t I just making a decisionYou’ve got no idea how captivating those little secrets I want to knowYou leave me hanging by a strand you mend and breakA final decision that’s never too late.


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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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poetry now - july / august 2010

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