pulverized diamonds

Marvin Bell

Begin Here


How is a shirt like death,

before dawn, losing the blackness,

already the spit echoing hoarsely

in the throat, tranquility before

sledghammers, up this early before

anyone to pick pants and shirt?

 

Is this the shirt you will die in?

Then a shirt is like death, and changes

life. Or is this a shirt you will

advance in, a handsome appearance

for a feeling like lugging stones?

The skin, too, is a pressed shirt,

 

worns by the roads snarling inside.

A blue road wears a blue cover,

or so it seems; as a red road, red.

To lose your shirt is to lose your

life, a gamble the hooded heart takes

because you are buttoned up in front.


--

from Tim Kahl:




Presents

Brian Teare and Kate Greenstreet

Monday, Oct. 19 at 7:30 PM
HQ for the Arts | 1719 25th Street


The recipient of Wallace E. Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell Colony fellowships, Brian Teare has published poetry in American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Provincetown Arts, Seneca Review, Verse and VOLT, among other journals, and in the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and The Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English. His first book, The Room Where I Was Born, won the 2003 Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His second book, Sight Map, University of California Press; Pleasure, his third, will be out from Ahsahta in 2010. He lives, teaches and makes books by hand in San Francisco.

from “Emerson Susquehanna” by Brian Teare


i. “When we have lost our God of tradition

Not thaw brought to the river—
thought, long winter a surface that holds
no current or image.
And there’s language laid down like that, mind

locked in a long walk through the chill of a single word, and there’s cattails

    fraught where water’s not

any longer, and God’s a pall called down to mind the meaning

    given a life. Once thought

the word makes mind too small

    like Bible-colored Sundays all study and chalk and exotic

potted palms dotting a holy land

    entirely crayon and the lavender mimeographs leave

on the hands. The word God has always been my mother’s

    fingers separating


my sister’s hair, three strands gathered in a braid so tight white at the parted dark

    roots stood out, word

a migraine in its wake, word endured alone in a room. Shades

    drawn over pain, word’s

a mind’s light ingrown, caught, nitid knot snarled upon

    itself…Subzero, months

from thaw, we walk — o trees, trouble,

    tremble at the roots of being, underneath,

under laws, the order of things

    so deeply a violence and unnumbered like the snow.





Kate Greenstreet’s second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta Press in September. Her first, case sensitive, was published by Ahsahta in 2006. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Her new work is in current or forthcoming issues of jubilat, Court Green, VOLT, Fence, and the Denver Quarterly. She is married and lives in New Jersey, no pets.



from The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet

i
They’re taking the boats out of the water.
The sound of time passing the old notes.

Rereading our old mail, a place
to be remembered.

And if my brother
should call to me?


ii
The world was ending, and everybody knew.
We lined up to say goodbye.

I saw some people out on the bridges.

One guy said don’t worry—when it comes,
there’ll be nothing left.


iii
In calling, get ready.

Dear, there is a bridge between the middle and the end.
Designed by winds,
caused to flex.

Fate includes both falling to another
level, as in falling from windows,
stairs, or ladders,
and same level falls such as slipping
or stumbling.

But remember when I asked if you were carrying an umbrella
and I asked you what you felt and I think there was a blind
person, sitting near you.
It’s very strange
not to be writing,

not even to be drawn to it.
A lot of time
just at the piano,
an old upright that came with the house.
Just some old pieces I knew once, but I feel it quickens me.

Some keys don’t strike fully and the surfaces are curling.
They don’t use ivory anymore.
Dreamed of you this morning.

Am still hoping to see you.




--

ALL GOOD THINGS / Jobe

From Mary Zeppa in an email:

Friends,

April, as many of us have good reason to know, is National Poetry Month.  The Sacramento Poetry Center (SPC) provides a regular venue for literary events all year long.  But in April, as you’ll see at our website  www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org, SPC really picks up the pace.

I will be the featured reader at SPC’s Monday, April 20 reading.  2009 marks SPC’s 30th anniversary; I have been actively involved for 28 of them.  As a way of keeping that history alive, of celebrating all we’ve accomplished together, I’ve invited a group of (to borrow a phrase from the Time-Tested Books series) SPC’s “Veteran Voices” to join me.  What I have in mind is to make the second half of the evening a sort of invitational open mic; each reader gracious enough to fall in with my scheme will have 5 minutes.  Local people who can’t make it but would like their voices to be part of our evening may opt to have someone else read a poem or two.  Those no longer in our midst may also be given voice.

It’s a busy time, I know.  But, if your schedule permits, I hope you’ll join

Mary Zeppa and Friends *
 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 20
The Sacramento Poetry Center
1719-25th Street
Free admission

*   Confirmed readers thus far:  Victoria Dalkey, Patrick Grizzell, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Annie Menebroker and Tom Miner.

(end email)

I'll add this---


Mary Zeppa

The Begotten

In the dream, the fat baby, soft as our last wish,
powdery, warm in my arms. And solid, as real
as tomorrow, cradled and passed hand to hand.

It's the top of her head we keep kissing: fresh, sweet
and rich in the nose. We are millionaire misers,
a phalanx and tender. Our voices, at last,

reach to God. Yet, in the next scene, we are prisoners:
concentration camp: shuddering, naked. Terror
leaks out of our eyes. We all know

where we're going. Even the baby for whom
we would all leap through fire as we must for we see
the smoke (silver-white, plumy) rising up to the edge of our cliff.


Also around the corner, this is from an email from Cynthia Linville:

Saturday, April 18, 7:00 - 8:30, Poetry at The (new) Vox , 4th and F in West Sac just over the I Street Bridge from downtown (Old Union Hall).  Readers: Rachel Leibrock, Joe Atkins, Lytton Bell, Genelle Chaconas, James Benton, Jen Jenkins, Matt Veazey, and Crystal Anderson. Hosted by Cynthia Linville.   Benefit for the Sacramento Homeless.  Donations welcome.  clinville@csus.edu  VoxSac.com

(end email)

To which I add---


Lytton Bell

The White Sundress

I only knew you from study hall

We were both sixteen
walking in the woods behind the football field

when you pushed
me up against a tree
The hard bark

bit into the flesh at the open back
of my white sundress
You moved quickly, your body pressing against my body
your lips opening my lips

your tongue tangled in my tongue
The white sundress tied at the neck
and you untied it with it a single tug
and the whole top fell, suddenly, to my waist
and your ravenous hands engulfed me

I gasped
and you lifted the hem of the white sundress
sliding it up my thigh, slipping your fingers inside the elastic
of my lavender underwear
You groaned
and whispered, “Will you let me?”

And my teenage mind could not feel beyond that moment
beyond the tree and the sun
in my eyes and your fingers and the white dress -
could not see, could not know how you would die, or how soon
or how the loss of you would enter me
and enter me all my days

And I heard myself say “Anything, anything.”


So don't sit at home so much, man. And feel free to email me poems, poetry reading announcements, or poetry links.

jamesleejobe@gmail.com

ALL GOOD THINGS - JOBE

Lytton Bell - 2 poems



How to be Charlotte Brontë


Desire more worldly experience than you possess

Never settle for knitting stockings, making puddings
playing on the piano or embroidering bags

Tear meat with your teeth
Write less like a man than a fallen seraph
with a message from the eternal throne
Find a pilot in your seducer
Go down in love

Listen to the bustle of the busy world, towns
regions brimming with life you sense but never see
Hear them singing to you, ringing your cranial bell

Let your heart heave with exultant movement
expand with life; open your inward ear to a tale without end
a tale you create and perpetually narrate
tempered in an actual flame

Abandon visionary woe
Grasp mortal happiness, even when it sinks
sharp small animal mouths into your skin
Even if you must blacken yourself out of Eden’s family portrait

Sit quietly with apparitions, near the window
in the parlor beside the charred Horse Chestnut tree
Let ghosts probe you with hands colder than wind
Want them

Don’t ever go to bed while sunrise enfolds moonset

Cloak naked feet beneath your long dress
the purple one that bares
your tattered hands

And when the long night cracks open at last
like a raw egg across a plate of sky
let the dawn come in you so hard that
you know it is the first time
daylight ever really mattered




How to Seduce Me


Be able to cry without effort or shame
Love your mother
Smoke weed in your back yard
Be late for staff meetings because you paused
to admire a red bird
Wear plaid
Clean your glasses with a corner of your blue shirt
revealing deep brown eyes
Let me confess everything
softly in your ear
Quote Shakespeare as a form
of small talk
Quote Blake as a form
of foreplay
Mesmerize me with the nudity of your words

Lay it all out on the table, naked
Lay me down on the table, naked

Ram your tongue down my throat
Hold my hips with both hands
Close your eyes
Give it all to me
and after I have screamed your name
make me whisper it

Think about me (what’s the word you use?)
perpetually

Make me love even the injustices of the past
because they have delivered me to this moment

Show me what I was missing
until the instant you smiled

Just be you
I’m open
I would die for this
but without it
cannot fully live

Send me some kind of signal
Blink, nod, claw the air, moan
if you understand




"How to Be Charlotte Bronte" won third place in the Friends of the Sacramento Public Library's Focus on Writers contest in 2002. It was later published in Convergence in Summer 2004.

"How to Seduce Me" first appeared in Clean Sheets Erotica Magazine on 03/20/02.



Lytton Bell has published two chapbooks (A Path Before Winter, 1998, and The Book of Chaps, 2002), won five poetry contests (Sacramento Public Library, 2002, Tickled by Thunder, 2003, Laughing Frank, 2003, the Brodine/Brodinsky/Connecticut Poetry Society, 2004 and the Wergle Flomp Competition, 2008) and performed at many local venues, including the Sacramento Poetry Center, Luna’s Café and The Book Collector, to name a few. Her work has appeared in over two dozen publications.

Feel free to email me poems, poetry reading announcements, or poetry links.

jamesleejobe@gmail.com

ALL GOOD THINGS - JOBE