December 25, 2011

bookstore ballerina



body tucked tight
pointed like a sign
as if to plunge,
she was all
sudden descent,
elbows in
to minimize
the splash,
as if she could
concern herself with how
the surface of fluid
behaves when she is
under, every
movement there
ripples in
waves of people, bobbing
like buoys on a linoleum
sea of purchases. she
could not disappear,
not there, but described
to, hinted of, a pole to them,
and hoped their christian training
would suspend their disbelief,
press something soft and warm
against something cold and stiff 
and prone, blow
life into form, trust in
what she could be,
make them, if they should see,
which most did not,
the role she knew,
it's lines memorized until
it became a virtuosic flurry of
there-is-nothing-here-for-you-to-see,
look away my darlings,
she did not say, with
a casual wave of pale wrist
look away from me,
i am no mirror for you
and i am not here,
unless i need to be,
but smiling of course,
and pretty, she will
nod, and display teeth
for them who blink,
and they may demand
her breath and gaze,
though their wallets
balloon and their eyes
are a troubled sky
that refuses to let
light shine-
let me show you, he says,
you, he says, here
like this, and she
pantomines for him, like that.

a skin stuffed with barely silent swifts,
she flutters her limbs, like a bag of quick
while he strokes his mustache in the warm
globe of precious sunday light.
as if measuring the leap it would take.

if she wasn't such a clown,
and a good one too,
they would have found
out by now. but he knows,
little by little, he knows...



December 11, 2011

Poetry Reading & Open Mic Featuring Valentine Freeman & The Moonlit Guttery Team


Poetry Reading & Open Mic
Featuring
Valentine Freeman & The Moonlit Guttery Team:
David Cooke, Ragon Linde, A. Molotkov,
Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk & John Sibley Williams




"Time and Distance" is a performance of poetry with music, featuring words by Cooke/Molotkov/Tkaczyk.../Williams, with Ragon Linde on 12-string guitar, John Sibley Williams on Theremin plus vocals and occasional percussion from the whole Team.

Linda Hutchins & Endi Bogue Hartigan--drawing & poetry call & response @ nine gallery




 
This event is part of "silver and rust," a collaborative exhibit between artist Linda Hutchins & poet Endi Bogue Hartigan at Nine Gallery, which will be open for the month of December. On Sunday, December 11, they will be performing a poetry and drawing call-and-response, Endi reading poetry from a project in progress & Linda ...drawing on the walls of the gallery--with a method using all the fingers of both hands simultaneously by wearing silver thimbles on her fingers. They will give two different reading & drawing performances on December 11, at 3:30 & 4:30-- you're welcome to atttend one or both.




Nine Gallery                                                                 
122 NW 8th Ave
(inside of Blue Sky Gallery)

www.lindahutchins.com

Spare Room Presents: Bill Luoma & Juliana Spahr @ open space cafe 730pm sunday

  
Oakland poets reading tonite @ open space cafe for the spare room reading series. Bill Luoma's Some Math was released in September 2011 by Kenning editions. Juliana Spahr's Well Then There Now is out from Black Sparrow Books in 2011.

December 7, 2011

loggernaut reading series wednesday 730 ristretto roasters

A reading with John Beer, Apricot Irving, and Riley Michael Parker

Wednesday 730pm - 1030pm
Ristretto Roasters,
3808 N. Williams
The prompt is "Stranger,"

JOHN BEER is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which received the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. He teaches c...reative writing in Portland State University's MFA program. He recently moved to Portland from Chicago, where he wrote about theater for Time Out Chicago.
APRICOT IRVING has reported from Haiti for This American Life and won a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for her forthcoming memoir, The Missionary's Daughter. She is the founder and director of the Boise Voices Oral History Project and an excerpt of her memoir will appear in More magazine early next year.
RILEY MICHAEL PARKER is the author of Our Beloved 26th (Future Tense, 2008) and A Plague of Wolves and Women (Lazy Fascist, 2011). Parker is the founder of Housefire, a Portland-based experimental press that has recently issued the work of many exciting new writers.



http://www.loggernaut.org/

December 6, 2011

he asked the spider for sewing lessons







fog draped hills
again clung clouds
incrementally wrung 
along the way
wondering how
to thread
the eye
before me
wondering how
to fly when
there
is
nothing
nothing

nothing is
a web
.
.
.


December 5, 2011

we make our offerings on the charnel ground


charcoal feathers slicked back to shine, leather jacketed crows, gather like commas on a blank page of pavement, like compact oil slicks that somehow congealed into the shapes of birds. they are the starless words I could not find, haunted by feathered wraiths of jittery ink. I watch them push the one pigeon among them from the plaid pantry’s parking lot. this morning is not Monday though it certainly is moonless. the sky lingers just above like a tube of ash about to be tipped. I pause outside the door conspicuously holding a bright pink carton of half & half.  Across the street, there is a martial arts studio with a petite square sign in neon that could read, if you were almost looking, “northwest academy of infernal arts.” Alongside, a row of nearly leafless trees, finally reveal the wire mesh that suspends their plume. They are upside-down hearts, thickly veined with reaching, in desperate slow-motion, not to finally arrive. Growing until the dying, that we always do, overtakes the reaching.  Will you know when you are in that lane? Hunched inside as if hiding from what looks, you clenched yourself into the tightest shape that could roll, summoning the cracked pieces of shell that lay, scattered all around you, retreating  deeply into winter. Could you die enough again to become once more? Do you die any faster when you try to stay? The all but bare branches sporadically tinkle with crisp dull diamonds, as if the wind were too restless to pluck them all and found some other land to lick, as if the tree couldn’t finish its crying, saving a few tears for the darkest night of December. The leaves are the color of faded gold. They are what’s left of the color in my neighborhood, as if color had been ordered to evacuate. Same as the neon sign that does not blink. Same as the numerals on the bus that comes for me.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-uEjO9zfbc