Artful Blogging, Spring 2010

Some of my poems are included in this spring’s issue of Artful Blogging, along with other This Joy Ride contributors’ work…. get your copy at newstands or on line!

http://www.stampington.com/html/artful_blogging_spring10.html

I love that all this digital/virtual art craves to be held in real hands!

VoiceCatcher Call for Submissions

VoiceCatcher–an annual anthology featuring new and established women writers of diverse perspectives, voices, ages, orientations, and experiences–offers a panoramic view of literary life in the Portland/Vancouver area. We publish both poetry and prose.

The submission window for VoiceCatcher 5 is open from February 1 to March 31, 2010.  For guidelines, please check our website (www.voicecatcher.org). We’d love to hear your voice.

Trucker’s Atlas, by Favor Ellis

Trucker’s Atlas

I should have taken notes, sketched landmarks. Left breadcrumb trails and taken cartography classes. There have been so many long roads. Shortcuts I took only when my palms would itch at the thought of detour. People could benefit from that sort of atlas, I think. The record of back roads we managed to take, one end to the next, with or without disaster. People need that kind of information.

People need to know which road always washes out by which stand of trees. Which day, week, month you can be sure to see which creatures behind which shadows. People ought to be able to make informed decisions.

I have some information.

I know that ten-mile stretch where you can turn your radio dial to the in-between station and be guaranteed to hear a song that will break your heart. I know about the woman who leaves hot biscuits on the bench by her mailbox. I don’t know who she leaves them for. I assume they’re for me, because they’re always there, always hot.

I could tell you about the dirty old dog whose feet smell like toast, who loves to sleep in my cab from the town with the trees to the one with the water. She waits for me on the bank until I swing by to bring her back to the shade of sweeping branches.

There’s the one stretch, the wide plain between the sun on the tallest tree, and the moon on the smallest hill, where I roll down my windows and holler out whatever old songs come into my head. That’s how I first met the toast dog – she heard me singing and came running through the brush, hot biscuit in her mouth swiped from the bench down the way.

I taught myself how to sing on these roads. And I’ve memorized poems, long wordless tributes to the women I’ve loved. I especially like the poems I’ve written for the woman I’ve only seen once, 50 miles fast past, she never even knew I was here.

I should have been more forward thinking. Known how much it would be needed. Everyone needs a map. And if I’m the first one on these roads, or the first with a pen handy, I’m doing you all a disservice sitting in my truck, humming, eating biscuits, tracking the movements of the sky, when I should have been telling you what I know.

Favor Ellis loves words, magic, subtext and story. She lives in Portland, grateful to be surrounded by beautiful creatures she loves fiercely and with joyful abandon.

 

“Trucker’s Atlas” was first published in VoiceCatcher 4, and is reprinted here with permission.

Upcoming VoiceCatcher (and related) events

Wednesday, January 13th, 7-9 pm, QCeter for Qliterati, 4115 N. Mississippi, Portland, OR

Join us as we highlight the queer (and queer friendly) writers of VoiceCatcher.

Readers will include:

• Favor Elis
• Nikki Jardin
• Pearl Waldorf
• Luna Prado
• Traci Schatz  

Thursday, January 14th, 6:30 pm. Cover to Cover Books, Vancouver, WA. Join Cover to Cover to celebrate the book launch of WIND WING, by Toni Partington, music by Alisha Judge, and three years of open mic poetry with a reading and potluck.

 

Please bring some food and poems to share.

Open Mic Poetry hosted by Christopher Luna
every second Thursday, “always all ages and uncensored”

Cover to Cover Books
1817 Main Street, Vancouver
McLoughlin Blvd. & Main Street

For more info call 514-0358 or 910-1066
christopherjluna@gmail.com
http://christopherluna-poetry.blogspot.com

Win a copy of For the Willing!

Look UP! Identify the picture hosting Thread & Bead’s main page and win a signed copy of my chapbook (even if you already own a copy). Answer must be EXACT. Think wide. Think odd. GO!

Clues — think Portland, think recycled…

1.12.10.

OK…. I realize I’ll have to come up with a more universally guessable quiz soon, but here’s some more clues….

Nike, feet, parks……

And the winner is… Tom Mattox, of Portland! He guessed “frost on a bench made of recycled sneakers”….. as exact as one can get! It is ice on a basketball court made of recycled shoes donated by Nike.

On the lookout for more interesting things below, above, around, anywhere beauty meets ordinary…

 

Poem, by Katharine Salzmann

 

(Untitled)

The bushtit’s

the teacup breed,

the demitasse of birds,

‘Bird” filed down to its finest point.

It travels in a frantic clan of bossy smallness,

a mad pack of staccato eighth notes

plucks the last curly seed puffs off the

wintering clematis, bark bits and bugs –

That chipping flock sings a crazy zipper

between the lilac and the rose:

never stop,   never never,   never stop,

their everyday, all day, high, grey labor

cuts the cold spring in half,

breaks up the last ice,

a blip on the bird radar

but for its bright plenty and incessantness.

Katharine Salzmann is a poet, mother, and massage therapist in SE Portland. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Hemopoiesis (1995), and Prayer Ceremony (2007), both of persian pony press.

In honor of the bushtits, frantically feeding on suet cakes all over town, and for Katharine, friend and poet en plein air.

Virtually yours

At The Three Friends coffee house/Show and Tell Gallery series, Sage Cohen, Sara Guest and I had a wonderful night reading our poetry to a full house and a full moon over our shoulders. A pod-cast is available at http://showandtellgallery.org. (also check out their other podcasts of readings and open mics).

And Karen Munro wrote up a generous review of the evening at  http://portland.readinglocal.com/2009/12/01/event-recap-sage-cohen-sara-guest-kristin-berger-at-three-friends-coffee-house/ .

One way to get out and warm your bones with words, without having to bundle up!

Nov. 30 at Three Friends

Please join me, Sage Cohen and Sara Guest for a night of friendly poetry!

Three Friends Mondays: Caffeinated Art
The Show and Tell Gallery
Three Friends Coffee House
SE 12th and Ash, Portland, OR 

 Monday, November 30, 7:00 p.m.

Release of the Cabbage Looper Moth

Release of the Cabbage Looper Moth

It beat its fuzzed breastbone against the taut paper towel ceiling

we had constructed over the glass jar, like a fishbowl in its expanse,

the rubber band snug under the rim. My exacting daughter poked air holes,

jaws jutting at new angles, mandibles clamped around the secret of Six.

For days we had held the cocoon captive. Tacky and transparent,

like a spider’s egg sack, we patrolled the tuft for any sign of change,

no idea who was tucked into that dreaming skin while it clung

to a single dried rose hip, cradled by grass and lemon balm.

In the dark, the paper crane mobile taunted in slow swirls.

I pulled the thin quilt up to her chin, covering the tanned, river-smooth chest,

white buttons of her pajama shirt undone and flung, as everything is

which I try to tuck at midnight. Within the soft pink cave of her mouth

teeth shifted within bone like tectonic plates, tremoring with song.

The din of the grating of the world. By morning

I barely recognized this creature that tunneled itself to daylight,

shed meconium from its wings with a Pollack flourish against the glass.

The abandoned cotton molt was impossibly small.

Before we could name it and give it purpose, the band broke in the garden.

Over sage, under fir. Last seen, the moth trammeled past

her surprised moon-face – shoulder blades unkitting themselves to reach –

through a netting of needles, a pin-prick, blue-bound.

– Thank you, Oregon State Poetry Association, for awarding my lil’ poem 1st Place in Poet’s Choice category! This one is for my little bug guardians, A & J.

Poetry and Prose for the People Reading Series, Oct. 21

Poetry and Prose for the People Reading Series Barnes & Noble Lloyd Center, PDX Third Wednesdays (except holiday months) Hosted by Sage Cohen and Tomas Mattox Wednesday, October 21, 7:00 p.m. Barnes & Noble 1317 Lloyd Center // Gift section Portland, OR 97232 503-249-0800

Presenting poets Judith Arcana, Kristin Berger and Laurel Blossom

Judith Arcana writes poems, stories, essays and books. Her recent chapbook, 4th Period English, reads like a play: poems in the voices of high school students talking about immigration. Among her prose books is Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography. She lives in Portland, Oregon; visit her website: juditharcana.com.

Kristin Berger lives with her family in Portland, Oregon, where she serves as an editorial member of VoiceCatcher. Kristin’s poetry and essays have appeared in Calyx, New Letters, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Wild Goose Poetry Review. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008), an Oregon Book Award nominee. Her non-fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Read more at www.kristinberger.wordpress.com.

Laurel Blossom’s book-length narrative poem, Degrees of Latitude, was published by Four Way Books in November, 2007. Her most recent book of lyric poetry is Wednesday: New and Selected Poems, Ridgeway Press, 2004. Earlier books include The Papers Said (Greenhouse Review Press, 1993), What’s Wrong (Cobham & Hatherton Press, 1987), and Any Minute (Greenhouse Review Press, 1979). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005), and in national journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Pequod, The Paris Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Deadsnake Apotheosis, Many Mountains Moving, Seneca Review, and Harper’s, among others. Her poetry has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and the Elliston Prize. Learn more at www.laurelblossom.com.