Cynthia Linville and Tim Bellows
Monday Sept. 3 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street — SPC
Host: Bob Stanley
Cynthia Linville teaches writing at California State University, Sacramento and frequently hosts and reads at poetry events, both on her own and with Poetica Erotica. Her book of collected poems, The Lost Thing (2011) is available from Cold River Press. A music aficionado with a theater background, Linville supports the arts in Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is managing editor and designer of Convergence: An Online Journal of Poetry and Art.
Reunion at a Sidewalk Café.
All stories are the same, he says.
He sips his white mocha
reaches for my hand
tells me his second wife doesn’t understand.
We both know we were bad for each other
like too much wine
like too much chocolate
like a motorcycle going too fast in the rain.
All stories are the same.
Tim Bellows is a college writing teacher, poet, essayist and photographer devoted to wilderness and the divine and quirky ways of words. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s published work in over 200 literary journals, in Sunlight from Another Day – Poems In & Out of the Body (Authorhouse Press), and in A Racing Up the Sky (Eclectic Press). His poems appear in Desert Wood, an Anthology of Nevada Poets and in Wild Stars (Starry Puddle Press). Tim’s poem “North Shore, Sierra Lake” won honorable mention in the Sacramento Poetry Center Contest, 2011.
(For free tips on crafting poems and allowing the real you to make flights unlimited: Tim recommends <http://yourpoetryprof.com/> )
LETTER FROM TAHOE PINES, SEPTEMBER NINTH
You left for Stockton – to chase down
needed bucks from steady work,
pecking away at silly Chiclets
set in electric gizmos under
mercury-filled tubes of light.
*
You, beautiful,
kissed me and mounted the bus –
were you fluid or solid,
draped inside that jasper green top
that reaches down past your hips?
Me? I gotta keep this editing job,
staying on as winter
tightens its power to freeze paint off shacks,
stores and motels. . . . Still
I hope a few crystalline days remain, sun
washing a quick hint of warmth into my skin.
It’ll be relief. In moments.
*
Yesterday I went down to our lakeside spot.
That bright sand and water. Our private cove.
I don’t think I got back
to our mood, our easy visits there.
I ran my hand through the water anyway,
took a stab at grace. You know, friend,
the water was cold as knifeblades.
