President’s Message Winter 2016 It’s been a full year for poetry and poets in Sacramento. At SPC, we’ve had some of our biggest events ever, here in our 37th year. Our April workshop was inspiring, with workshops and readings by some visiting poets including Susan Gubernat, Sally Ashton, Alexis Levitin, and Salgado Maranhao. Tim Kahl put together this well-attended program once again, and about 50 local writers enjoyed the full day of poetry. In June we brought California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia to the Crocker’s theater, and nearly 200 people settled in for a masterful evening of poetry and conversation with this nationally known poet and speaker. It was a real pleasure for many of us to meet Dana, who is still working on his 58-county poetry tour of California! I think we showed him a good time here in the Capitol City. As if one world-class poet wasn’t enough, SPC and the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission teamed up to bring Juan Felipe Herrera to the Crest on November 12th. Mr. Herrera, the US Poet Laureate, did not disappoint! In fact, he gave us all hope in a time when we needed some hope (yeah, that November). His stories, his poems, his call-and-response pieces wove an intense spell – a remarkable blend of warmth, style, and opinion – the likes of which this reporter had not seen before. Lawrence Dinkins and Ross Hammond were awesome that night too. Know this: 600 people poured into the Crest for poetry, my friends! And Juan Felipe sat and talked with as many as he could. He was truly inspiring – we were lucky to have him here. Thanks to all our members and volunteers and donors who helped SPC put on nearly 200 events in 2016. Monday night readings (free), Tuesday night workshops (free), Third Thursdays in the Sacramento Room (free), Mosaic of Voices (free), Sacramento Voices (free). We’re also proud to be supporting Sac State’s upcoming event that will bring Forrest Gander to Sac State on January 30th. Note: No reading at SPC on that Monday night – but do your best to come see Gander, a poet and translator of the first order at CSUS – details to follow soon! That’s it for now – time for a line break – thanks to all – Bob
Matt Mitchell Taylor Graham Rick Rayburn Paul Aponte Robert Lee Haycock Reann Tellez Allegra Jostad Silberstein Laura Rosenthal Lucille Lang Day Tom Goff
MATT MITCHELL
Noah Island
Past dog beach Place of flat rocks Far past diamonds in the green Beyond magpie’s talk There lies the Bermuda grass lawn Willow thicket Goose eggs, feathers, strange bones Sticks for a fort you want to bring home Naming a place – there’s power in it Even little Noah Island, there, then not Out across slippy stones, water sunlit Place of fishermen, river birds, small children. Then gone.
TAYLOR GRAHAM Obedience Whose suggestion was it, to meet at this deserted little green corner of a park? A picnic table, swingset, hardly enough grass for soccer. On sunny weekends I’ve seen kids throwing balls or swinging suspended on chains of flight. But not on a cold March Thursday, wind pushy as winter. No cars in the parking lot. No one to see our pups break the sit-down-stay. Still, I felt a presence – and there he was, speaking to a tree; threadbare, bearded, garbed in a long brown hoodie. Peculiar, I thought. The tree called back to him in voice of crow, softened. Our rowdy pups went silent, sat without command; eyes fixed on his. How can I learn this language?
RICK RAYBURN Mazatlan, 1967 December jasmine breeze blankets our tent, somewhere above in black sky night hawk’s haunting call fades. Shirtless we fall asleep on our bags to the soft unfolding of the shorebreak on wet course sand. Rising sun backlights tropical palm forest, brushed by lime filtered vines, near-shore island rests on azul sea. We awake to moaning, melodic psalm, a psalm from the heavens… Paawwn, paawwn, lay-chay, lay-chay, bow-nanna, whatta-meelon… Cocked heads, puzzled smiles, listening… Paawwn, paawwn, lay-chay, lay-chay, bow-nanna, whatta-meelon… The brown man in khakis and sandals greets us, buenos días. On a two-wheeled cart, flagged in red, white and green, his morning offering— warm rolls, cold milk, bananas, cut melon, and black can with red poinsettia reads Tecate Cerveza. We ponder, order, “Quantos pesos?” Brown man strokes his scruffy cheek— smiles at the parrot on outdoor shower head, kackling, kaka-kiowa, kaka-kiowa— “Vente peso, gracias. Feliz Navidad, mio amigos.” He moves down the rutted, clay road, Paawn, paawn, lay-chay, lay-chay,* bow-nanna, whatta-meelon…
PAUL APONTE Magical Words The fire of her subtle beauty Femininity that emanates without permission Brands the mind with supple skin undiscovered sinuous shadows to explore Hexes the soul with passion’s embraces fingers embedded in skin extricating desire Ties the tongue into desires for magical words El fuego de su belleza sutil Feminidad que se emana sin permiso Quema la mente con piel suave, regia y tentaciones a sombras sinuosas Hechiza el alma con abrazos de pasión dedos desaparecidos en piel liberando el deseo Ata la lengua en deseos por palabras mågicas
ROBERT LEE HAYCOCK Sleep in my eyes I recall Rappelling Into a glut of boxes Surrounded by every dog I’ve ever known Pine needles in my bed I’m coming home
Improper Record Handling Call Sleepy street lamps Response Television blue eyes Handbags gladrags please Be quiet please Raymond Play vibraphone mingling singles Syllabus An ache almost A downfall An upshot As you say Hindsight is 50/50
REANN TELLEZ Bullet Don't shoot. Dont tell me you love me. The taste of copper lingers too long. More than just on my mind. The taste of the blood leaving my heart through my mouth. Thick and full of traces of you Please let this be lust. I don't need your trust. Just, don't shoot.
ALLEGRA JOSTAD SILBERSTEIN Trains Rush into Night You are gone. I will not hear your feet that peculiar rhythm I recognize come pounding on my porch, will not hear my door opening, will not see your face. No entering. Only winter light passing through the stained glass window facing east, the window you gave me, blue with golden smoke: a dream train of leaded glass propelling itself into sight pushing through leaden barricades of the heart. Light congeals into droplets at the edges of my eyes like moist air on a cold window pane. In the distance a steady chug-chugging, a whistled warning from Amtrak’s Zephyr traveling east, rushing into the night, gathering speed for the steep grade that lies ahead. And I, my heart’s engine pounding slip between flannel sheets— curl up in fetal comfort to dream of night boardings.
LAURA ROSENTHAL Seeing a Cartoon In the Newspaper, I Think about the Ultimate Question An endless line of sheep-people – faces bent over phones, thumbs engaged – step off the cliff, one after another after another. In my vision, there is no phone, no inadvertent step off the scarp – whoops! – just full frontal terror. Naked eyes reveal black chasm – no grass-sheltered escape paths soften the drop. Legs grind toward the abyss, obey body’s grim exigency – No GPS to shepherd me home.
LUCILLE LANG DAY The Sea Rises In a house high on a cliff overlooking the sea, surely my husband and I are safe from the storm, but as wind begins to shriek, the sea rises in bigger and bigger waves, until tsunamis, each one a hundred feet or higher, crash over the house one after another, and there is no escape except by waking, which I do. My husband is asleep beside me, but I know in truth there is no escape from the great waves that have already claimed my parents and daughter. The planet is warming as gunmen shoot up schools and nightclubs, suicide bombers strike beaches and restaurants, and everyone’s cells and organs fail with age. But sunlight leaks through the blinds, a jay calls, and thinking today will be okay, I breathe deeply and start to weep.
EDITOR’S CHOICE TOM GOFF At Bodega Head This primeval ocean stretch, Bodega Bay itself is not: post-Hitchcock cormorant and pelican cavalcades, sharp cries; and sprays of jade or slate outpour crash in at slant against our bastion, black primordial rock whose magma upthrusts for us through large-grained sands. Rod, Tippi, the Tides administer standard shock, still good, when despite blonde “Melanie’s” warding hands, a gull bursts out of bland sky to temple-peck, trickles a blood-paint sprinkle down Tippi’s forehead. Here signs proclaim sea-reach remote from her boat’s lagoon, foretell a new brooded giant, a breed born dread. Down from the northwest will flare its vast wingspan, wreck whoever can’t scramble up heights from sand: but how soon?
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES Matt Mitchell is a math teacher who lives in Sacramento. He has published several print and radio essays for outlets ranging from KQED radio to the Sacramento Bee, and keeps a blog related to his former career as an urban planner at www.prospericity.net. This is his first poetry submission. Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016). Rick Rayburn is a fourth generation Angeleno, raised in Pasadena, and graduated from UCLA during the 60s. He lived in Arcata, Humboldt County working as a forest ecologist and coastal conservationist. He continued conservation work for California State Parks, while residing in suburban Sacramento. He has studied eco-poetry under Dr. Joshua McKinney, and completed a poetry, culture and art course at the Crocker Museum. His poetry appears in Sacramento Voices, 2016. Paul Aponte is a Chicano Poet from Sacramento. He is a member of “Escritores Del Nuevo Sol” (Writers Of The New Sun) and Círculo. In 1999, he published his anthology Expression Obsession, his work has been seen in WTF, La Bloga, El Tecolote Press, Poetry Now 2016-1 and Un Canto De Amor A Gabriel Garcia Márquez” a Chilean publication containing poems from around the world with 31 countries represented. Robert Lee Haycock grew up in California’s Santa Clara Valley, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight”, and now resides in Antioch, California “The Gateway to the Delta”. Robert has been an art handler at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco since 1988. Raeann Tellez is an 18 year old college student from Sacramento. She recently started writing poetry for fun. As she shared her work with family and peers, she was given great feedback and started to take her writing more seriously. Allegra Jostad Silberstein grew up on a farm in Wisconsin but has lived in California since 1963. Her love of poetry began as a child when her mother would recite poems as she worked. Now that she is retired, there is more time for singing and dancing as well as poetry. Allegra is widely published, and has three chapbooks with a recently published book by Cold River Press. In March of 2010 she was honored to become the first Poet Laureate for the city of Davis, CA. Laura Rosenthal grew up in the suburbs of New York and graduated from Cornell University and Stanford Law School. In the 1970s, she had poems included in a few poetry publications before turning to the full-time practice of law for close to forty years. In the past year, she has found herself returning to her “first love” of writing. She attends the Sacramento Poetry Center’s Tuesday evening workshop.
Lucille Lang Day (http://lucilllangday.com) has published ten poetry collections and chapbooks, most recently Becoming an Ancestor and Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, co-winner of the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize. She is also a co-editor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California and the author of two children’s books, Chain Letter and The Rainbow Zoo, as well as a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a Josephine Miles PEN Okland Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her poems, short stories, and essays appear widely in magazines and anthologies and have received nine Pushcart Prize nominations. The founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she is of Native American, British, and Swiss/German descent. EDITOR’S CHOICE Tom Goff is an instructional assistant at Folsom Lake College. He has published four chapbooks of poetry, the most recent Twenty Two (little m press, 2015). Some of his poetry on the English composer and poet Arnold Bax appears on the Sir Arnold Bax Website (arnoldbax.com), and on Medusa’s Kitchen, where he is a frequent contributor.
Turtoise Rocks by Kate Campbell
Bouquet by Kate Campbell
Night Passage by Randy White
Hanging on… 1, 2, 3… by Kate Campbell
Autumn by John A. Youril
My Inspiration II by Nanci Lee Woody
P H O T O G R A P H E R S
In addition to writing fiction and poetry, Kate Campbell is an environmental and political writer. She lives at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers and publishes the Word Garden blog at http://kcamp300.wordpress.com/ Her acclaimed novel Adrift in the Sound is available through online booksellers. Randy White is a California writer and education, and has won several literary awards. He is published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Recently his book, Blood Transparencies: An Autobiography in Verse, reveals his simple lyrical style, masking a strata of neo-tribalist philosophy, mythology and ancestral storytelling.
Nanci Lee Woody‘s “Tears and Trombones”, won an IPPY medal for “Best Fiction in the Western Pacific Region.” She loves drawing, painting and photography. Her art has been shown in various local galleries and on the KVIE on-air art auctions. Nancy found one of her favorite birds, black-necked stilts with their gorgeous, long pink legs, at Anahuac NWR (NE Texas) on a birding trip. She takes photographs in her spare time of anything striking or beautiful. John A. Youril is a writer, artist and photographer living in Northern California.
BOOK REVIEW I Advanced Dancing by Laverne Frith Artists Embassy International Gold Seal Book Award Presented at the Florence Gould Theater at the Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum San Francisco, CA. Publisher: Authorspress ISBN 9352073045
Dance, Dare and Dream a review by Mariam Ahmed Close your eyes and imagine a world unencumbered by the laws of physics and free from the hindrances of mundane duties. Now open your eyes and look around – the world you’ve imagined is a reality. This is what it feels like reading Laverne Frith’s “Advanced Dancing.” Frith weaves contemplative topics and musical descriptions into each poem. The majesty of natural elements like fire and rain, the loneliness of emotions left
unexpressed, and the celebration of art in all its wondrous ambiguity — these are a few of the subjects explored in the carefully crafted lines of “Advanced Dancing.” Readers familiar with the seasonal dispositions of California will discover exquisitely formed imagery in many of Frith’s poems such as “The Spreading Fog of San Francisco,” “It’s Winter Here In Sacramento,” “Death Valley Repose,” and “Early Summer Morning Tour, McKinley Park.” These pieces portray the fleeting moments in the subconscious of a traveler as he or she navigates the physical terrain and inner turmoil of his or her journey. By offering glimpses of physical spaces combined with evocative intuitive emotions, Frith allows the reader to experience as well as “Picture It” (another title of a poem from the collection). What exactly is “it,” the reader may ask. In his dedication, Frith declares that this collection is for “all who would dance and dare, despite the odds.” That gumption and hope – to dance, to dare, to dream – could be one interpretation of the “it” to which Frith alludes. Along with the balance of song and dance, the collection contains contrasting poems about the “odds” we face in our pursuit of daring. Poems like “Holding Back,” “Around the World,” and “State Mental Hospital Visit” depict the fleeting nature of memory and happiness. Rarely does a work successfully encompass a range of emotions and an accurate depiction of a time and place. “Advanced Dancing” contains both of these difficult-to-capture expressions. Finally, though the subject of this collection primarily focuses on the art form of dancing, I can also see a presence of self-awareness. Throughout the work, the theme of reflection presents itself in poems such as “In the Mono Lake of My Mind,” “The Mirror Cracked, And the Web Still Wrought,” and “Into a World of Mirrors.” While swimming through the language of these poems, the reader senses that there are still many elements of the
unknown left to be expressed – and that perhaps one could explore these mysterious entities by studying one’s reflection in a mirror.
Mariam Ahmed grew up in Folsom, CA and studied English Literature at UC Davis and UC Berkeley. She is an educator and published author.
BOOK REVIEW II Constellarium by Jordan Rice Finalist for the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize Publisher: Orison Books ISBN 9780990691778
Stars with Rivers Flow, on Jordan Rice’s Constellarium By Heather Judy Jordan Rice’s Constellarium is a universe unto itself, summoning stars sparkling down from a black façade to mingle below with thoughts of home. While the collection’s title is not definable, Merriam Webster’s English Dictionary defines its closest relative “constellation” as “the configuration of stars especially at one’s birth,” as well as “a group of stars that forms a particular shape in the sky and has been given a name.” With these thoughts in mind, as the speaker of the poems struggles with issues of identity, a reader tends to examine not only the speaker’s struggle to find the meaning of self within body, but also their her own.
The second poem, “My Life,” offers the reader a place from where they might begin. The speaker writes, “The physician tells me much I know already: / These structures of your mind correspond / with women’s” (ln 1-2). With this poem, it becomes clear that while the speaker already knows their feelings are female, they are not physically female at this point in time. The poem continues, “Life won’t be simple either way and, it’s an / impossible choice” (5-6). Male or female; live as body or as mind. The speaker is advised, “Lose weight now. Grow out your hair. Unlearn / hiding” (7-8). While the first two pieces of advice are practical physical measures one might take before undergoing a gender transformation, the third is not. As the line’s autonomy suggests, there will be much to unlearn. How to walk, to carry oneself, how to speak. However, following the enjambment, the sentence continues to reveal the full scope of its advice. That is to say, if one is to choose this transformation, the ability to hide behind a false front will no longer exist. One must be seen. “Mostly fear will pass. Passing’s always / a state of mind,” the poem continues, “though you may require surgery” it warns (8-9). The knowledge that science has proved the structures of the speaker’s mind correspond with a woman’s may at first come as a relief to someone struggling with gender identity, but the difficulty of the actualization of this knowledge will not just be a state of mind. Found in Part II of the collection, the poem “Lost Body” extends the theme of internal struggle against one’s own body. Depicted in a grocery store parking lot, the speaker writes, “I am coming out / to my mother, over the phone… saying / how I must change, that I cannot stand this body any longer” (5-7). A sense of excitement accompanies the reader as they hear the words “I am coming out,” one which is immediately complicated by the following line and the knowledge that the speaker is at this very moment coming out to their mother. Their inability to stand this body any longer seems to be glossed over by the mother as she retells the story of her child’s body, “the one she remembered / held and fed and would not hold only once – when [he] fell / beneath the rear tractor wheel” (9-11). According to the speaker, as this need for physical transformation is revealed to the mother years after this accident, “she is telling me now… that she stood over me in that field / only thinking: my son my son” (12, 16-17). As the speaker’s
mother did then, she does again at this moment, remembering her infant son as she held him at birth, as she stood over him the day of that accident, as she speaks in these lines, seeing only her son’s life being taken from her. In the final poem of Part III, “Water Witching,” the speaker tells of “the year his mother / hired a neighbor boy, fifteen, to make her six year old / a friend” (80-82). The speaker relates that this boy “would tell / and must explain the grainy truths of copulation” (83-84). The revelation continues with a description of “the wig they found, belonging to the boy’s mother, / from her own time in Memorial, and a breast prosthesis— [an] instructional with horrid reference” (8587). The reader learns that “the boy began to believe / breasts were not grown but worn” (87-88). “What was there to do but stare,” the boy wondered, “then lay his palm across the wig, while still pronouncing / mastectomy at the older boy’s insistence, to get it right?” (98-100). “It was fear,” the speaker says, “in both their voices and the under-hissing spell / of the younger one’s compulsion, while Atlanta grew / granite dark and darker and they waited for car lights” (101103). Witched in this fantastical place, a boy in a wig in a basement, “one could believe,” the speaker concludes, “all founts are false” (111-112). The collection’s final poem, “Saudade,” has a Portuguese title researched and found untranslatable except as a count noun loosely defined as “deep longing.” It declares in its opening lines that “the first time with her in the back corner room / of her father’s hotel was the first time” (1-2). “Afterward,” the speaker says, “I shook my father’s hand in a dream, and then / his father’s, and on down a line of men” (6-8). Whether the “I” is male or female in this poem is left unclear, and in the dream has either made a deal with or is being congratulated by their male lineage. Regardless, the speaker wakes in the present with hand “still clasped in another” and sees “it was snowing / and almost dawn” (10-12). Here, in the final moments of night, they “sat on the balcony above the last / of the dark… until the hill below us became a hill in the gray light” (12-14). Whether having made a deal, or done a great deed, the speaker and the lover exist in this dark beautiful world alone and with nothing else. We, as well as the speaker, are called to “remember this… Return / to see the stain of her mouth and the bare yawn / spiced with wine,
the scent of old smoke” (19-21). That is to say, we are called to remember the dark beauty of night, all its realness, and its stain, to remember its very smell, regardless what it is. “There is / no sorrow in this” the speaker says in the final lines, “Sunrise and the field aflame, / and she stirs in the light” (28-30). The book’s title poem, “Constellarium” leaves the reader with a clue to the meaning of the title’s collection and includes a set of longitudes and latitudes, “34® 50’ 40” North, 82® 23’ 8”.” When Googled, 34® North and 82® West marks a spot just west of Atlanta, where a group of stars forms a particular shape and boy in a basement begins to believe. Names are given. Stories told. Our mouths are open wounds. But these wounds we salve with words.
Heather Judy is a poet and artist living in Sacramento, California. She received her MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, California in 2009. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as the Tule Review, the California Quarterly, Flatmancrooked, and others.