Monday, September 23 at 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th Street
Alexandra Mattraw’s first book of poems, small siren, is available at Cultural Society (2018), and her second book is forthcoming from Cultural Society in early 2020. She is also the author of four chapbooks, including flood psalm (2017, Dancing Girl Press). Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Jacket2, Interim, The Poetry Project, and VOLT. In Oakland and San Francisco, Alexandra curates an art-centric writing and performance series called Lone Glen, now in its eighth year.
/ Vigil /
a hiccup of light
where I flashes
in and out : room
to whip hours
verging fiction
until ours leans
to real sea : make rooms
ripen the smell
of a heart : rip
out the iris
to see under
cadence moving
berber : wood
: flesh where I
fells speech to
splintershonest as any
treeless place
from Posit
Margaret Ronda is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis, where she teaches American poetry and environmental theory and literature. She is the author of two books of poems, Personification (Saturnalia Books, 2010) and For Hunger (2018), and a critical study, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford University Press, 2018).
from For Hunger
Misspelled
winter in the valley
still mostly sun
how long will it last
a heart pink on yellow paper
bleeds past its border
the shape it makes
can’t hold it close, can’t keep still
sudden flurry of rain
steadies and drives in
goes soft, edged with rot
the boy can spell yes, no, fall
but not leaves, which do not
letters collapse into
hard roots, unearthed
what he misspells: ran for rain
