5th Avenue Workshop
Dennis Hock, Connie Gutowsky, Ellen Yamshon, Jan Haag, Janet Johnston, Lee Amir, Marie Reynolds, Beth Johnson, Sue Staats, Terri Wolf
Monday March 9, 2015 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke
Note: Dennis Hock pictured here as Buddha statue
Connie Gutowsky is a retired criminal defense attorney. Her poems have appeared in multiple publications, including Kaleidoscope, Suisun Valley Review, Tule Review, Late Peaches, and Venturing in Ireland. Her book of poetry, Play, was published in 2013 by Random Lane Press. Her chapbook, Autumn’s Flush, was published in 2005. She has also written a children’s book, Ronald and Peter G Camping.
MY KITCHEN
This is my kitchen. I planned it, scrub it,
And season it with pleasure.
I stock it with eighty spices and herbs; six pure extracts;
Four kind honeys: acacia, manuka, sage, raw wild flower.
I have two sets of coffee spoons to measure cream;
Got last year’s best four-in-one avocado tool.
A fool for cook books, they line a blood-red shelf,
Smudged recipes ready for the old white
O’Keefe & Merritt stove, still a good cooker
If the oven door is carefully closed.
This is where I fed and played with our children,
Those open and bright seeds of heaven.
Did I mess them up? I didn’t mean to.
This is where things changed, unless they didn’t.
Here I sweep crumbs of longing from myself―
Clean, eager for the day’s ginger.
This is where I look my best.
I’m not always how I look.
Ellen Yamshon actually gets paid to write and serve as a mouthpiece. She claims she doesn’t get to be creative as a government lawyer because legal writing is very formulaic. But think sonnets, haiku and ghazals.
On a Beach in Bali, I Respond to the Torture Memos
I sit wrinkled, red-faced,
a reluctant star in a prison
striped one-piece.
Obligated to condemn
my country ’tis of thee
in response to the floodlight
of our collective Twitter feeds
exposing the odious scree
of Bush interrogation policy
And the torture of our
closely held allegiance
to human decency.
Dennis Hock, a retired English teacher, has published two books of poetry: The Secret Cup: Poems of Grief and Healing (2007) and Bringing Birds Through Stone (2015).
Selfie Similes
Like a car
I have a steering wheel
in the front of my brain.
Like a horse
I nicker at a sugar cube
in an unfolded hand.
Like a waterfall
I pause mid-air after the lip,
then fall in sheets through
the white sky of my own undoing.
Like starlight
I have travelled thousands of years
to get finally here.
And like a tired clock
I feel my hands lose their nerve
as my innards wind down.
This last is a relief actually:
to breathe out some final ticks
before resting in the sweet anonymous
of the defunct.
Engine dead.
Like a car’s.
Jan Haag is a writer who teaches English and journalism at Sacramento City College. She is the author of a book of poetry, Companion Spirit, as well as a young adult novel, Ocean Falls, and a new novel set in Sacramento. She is an Amherst Writers and Artists affiliate who leads local writing workshops.
Girl fish
(Granite Bay, summer 1966)
for Donna
We are fish out of water, little sister,
far from where we started:
flat land close to ocean
choked with palm trees
and orange groves, sidewalks
for roller skates and bikes,
Disneyland, four grandparents,
two aunts and an uncle and
two older girl cousins we adore.
Now we find ourselves
hundreds of miles north,
amid hills laced with giant-armed
oaks and long, waving grasses
that lighten under summer sun,
like our hair that grows more
blonde each day. Our skin pinkens,
too, with itchy poison oak
bumps that teach us:
leaves of three, let them be.
We live next to a big lake
that floats the wooden ski boat
Daddy built with Grandpa.
And next summer, after we
finish all our swimming lessons,
Mommy will float with us
in the deep blue, steady us
until we are pulled to our feet,
on long, wooden planks,
wobble a bit, then magically skim
across this liquid expanse.
We are girl fish growing gills
that allow us to breathe
this new kind of air.
Janet Johnston lives in Applegate with her one-eyed Chihuahua, Winkie. She leads AWA writing groups in Auburn at the California Relationship Center.
Considering Night
If blackness does indeed surround,
if light is an imagined spark,
then what is there to serve as ground
as we meander through the dark?
If it be true that we are blind,
imagining scenes of saphire mirth
and ancient stars through pinon pine,
then make my dream the red, red earth.
Lee Amir is Songwriter, poet, performer, educator, fun-loving instigator. Wordplay, improv, open mics, conversational poetry, flow, sound. And how can we make performance spaces & processes more inclusive? And what might we gain? The Wooden Prince (solo cd), YouTube, Masters in Theater & Dance with a Disability Studies focus, “Clint & Craig” (broadside), With Her, At the Edge of Is (chapbook honoring Raffles, the Beers Books kitty), flash fiction in Wordgathering, a Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature. Poetry in But You Look So Good (Ed. by John Crandall) and My Story (Ed. Liz Pearl). 100,000 Poets for Change poet/performer. Lee’s writing also appears in a collaborative essay in Petra Kuppers’ Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Contact: amir.leora@gmail.com
and a sample poem (not too lengthy)
The man in bed next to me says,
“A short poem
is not in Lee Amir’s nature”
as the birds outside tweetle
whatever it is birds tweetle to each other.
Who really knows?
I hear the hairbrush pull through
the long lengths of the hair of the man in bed
who is now the man in the bathroom,
then I hear the twinkly twinking of water from you
hit the water in the ceramic bowl,
then the thunk—actually more of a “think”—
of the toilet seat closing,
your steps across the carpet,
your fingers on the keyboard
on which my fingers now type.
I stretch my legs into the stripes of sun
on the bed. On my lips, the blueberry muffins
I mixed and spooned,
you put in the oven and baked,
and we ate yesterday and again this morning,
February 15th on this day after
Día de San Valentín.
And as I finish this piece,
I wonder, “Can I make a short poem
go all the places I need it to go
or do my beaters still feel
a little unlicked?”
Marie Reynolds has hosted the Fifth Avenue Workshop since 2007. She also facilitates an expressive writing group using the Amherst Writers and Artists method. Her poems have appeared in journals including Tule Review and Ekphrasis, as well as in the Sacramento anthology, Late Peaches. She has work forthcoming in Prairie Schooner in 2015. The following poem was published in Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts and Humanities.
Putting On His Socks
She doesn’t like to touch his feet —
limp, floppy as fish. Only after
she has dressed him —
white cotton socks over cold purple skin —
does she linger, caressing
one foot, then the other, uncurling
each toe — slow —while he moans
at what passes for pleasure. Only then
does she lift his foot to her lips, press
the sole to her body, recall
their first winter together —
the snug double bed, his elegant limbs —
how she could not swim inside him
long enough nor deeply, could not drink
the last drop of him without thirsting for more.
Beth Johnson runs River Song Meditation: a peaceful place in the heart of Curtis Park to replenish, connect and explore. She teaches Tibetan Buddhism and yoga and facilitates AWA style creative writing workshops. Her poems have appeared in the American River Literary Review and Northern Contours.
Concrete
She needed to see it before her
the days and months inked on paper
the pages thin between her fingertips
the years mapped out in squares
how to fit into the right angles
the numbers increasing, returning to one
climbing the same ladder again and again
-—this time she wanted to jump from the roof
believed she had wings and would fly
Sue Staats’ fiction and poetry have been published, or is forthcoming, in The Los Angeles Review, Graze Magazine, Farallon Review, Tule Review, Late Peaches:Poems by Sacramento Poets, Sacramento Voices, Alimentum, A Journal of Food, and others. She earned an MFA from Pacific University, and was a recent finalist for the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and the Nisqually Prize in Fiction. Her stories have been performed at the Sacramento and Davis reading series “Stories on Stage” and at the SF Bay-area reading series “Why There Are Words.” She’s currently working on a collection of linked short stories, and for the past year has served as the Coordinator of Stories on Stage Sacramento.
Swimming at the County Fair
Oh, the 4H girls at the county fair!
I’m half in love with them—
their long legs, slim hips, how they walk
in threes in the livestock barn. It’s May. They descend
like angels from Lodi, Herald, Wilton, Thornton,
in white pants, white shirts,
ripe-peach skin, crisp green kerchiefs tied
on slender necks.
They show breeder lambs dusted
with sparkle powder. Lambs and girls
twinkle like Christmas, luminescent plankton
swimming in salty hormone soup, boys with the girls
and other girls too, striding
in the shortest of shorts,
smooth, strong-boned legs
narrowing into boots.
In the show ring, the heifers move quietly
with a swing of hips.
The lambs pose, their legs taut as dancers.
The barn’s heat, the girls’ heat, twists and
spills like steam, like perfume,
glosses their bodies, wraps everything in warmth.
So much friction.
Their skin sheds, floats like dust,
like gold leaf. And why would they notice
this old lady as she lays it over hers
piece by piece?
Now, she thinks, maybe I’ll bloom
with their creamy, soft sheen
I’ll collect more scraps, beg
for their careless shreds, plead
for one moment of the juice, the give
the elastic joy of balance, the perfect faith
that my body is no different from a spoon.
I’ll take my greedy bites,
knowing that the bowl empties
soon enough.
Loose threads describes artist/writer/poet Terri Wolf who enjoys stitching things together–fabric, words, photos–whatever is in her path. She turns to the artistic process as therapy after spending days involved with her other passion–oncology nursing. Terri also facilitated a Writing as Healing program at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center for several years.
Nursing the Soul
This hospital room-studio
a white-washed cotton canvas
bleached sheets, sanitized pillows, linty cream-colored blankets, bone walls,
pearly cabinets, and those unwashed lab coats on Caucasian men
the absence of color
matches your backside visible from the split back of a dirty-water-gray
print gown and the stony knobs skipping up your back.
My finger paint only needs to pick up white–
to capture your remaining air-hunger breaths
the x-ray an infiltrating whiteout.
The nurse in me assesses you:
pt. on left side in bed, bedrails up, respirations labored, gave 5 mg morphine at 1200
The artist in me studies you:
lips a thin band of pale and cheeks graying, sculpting around bone
the images spin like a snow field meeting wind.
It’s cold in here, too.
Commercial air conditioning jetting in an arctic front
comingling with clear bags of biomedicine
designed to cure the body lying in wait
The soul cannot wait for art.
I want to nurse the soul sparkling underneath the frozen-in-morphine life
thaw this room
fire it with red-orange during the hour of fear and the minutes of hope.
plank the floor in willow wood.
Is it too much to ask that I could wrap you in art?
Let me unroll fleecy blankets and quilts with prayerful patches
and tuck them under your chin.
Let’s take a ride on the color wheel and paint your sorrow golden.
If you don’t like the hard edges of your diagnosis,
we could blur the lines with impressionism.
I could splash turquoise at your feet and mismatched reds in the air.
We’ll have tea and let your spirit steep in magenta and plum.
I’ll drop poetic words into your palms and we’ll string them together like beads
to make a mantra, a wish, a prayer.
I’ll invite a chorus of angel voices to serenade you down the hall
on the way to the biopsy
I‘ll ask choir voices to surround you—to dose lyrics to your heart to keep it going
if you despair as doctors conduct cold instruments
I’ll hire a symphony to play out a bed of notes to cushion this diagnostic blow,
a song that lets you down softly.
