Danyen Powell, Jim Moose, and Ann Conradsen
Monday, Sept. 16 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley
Danyen Powell, Davis, CA has had poems in Brevities, Pudding Magazine, The Poets’ Guild, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Chrysanthemum, Rattlesnake Review, The Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems and elsewhere. His chapbooks are: Anvil (Rattle Snake Press, 2004) and Blue Sky Flies Out (Rattlesnake Press, 2008). He is also the facilitator for The Sacramento Poetry Center’s weekly Tuesday night workshop (for over 15 years).
LOOKING BACK
before I was dead
the house was dead
as well as the sea
rain fell
gutters overflowed
twilight
was my love’s eyes:
swirls of black fish
Jim Moose is a retired civil servant (attorney and administrative law judge), a Navy veteran of WWII, and a graduate of UC Berkeley and its law school. He began writing poetry on retiring, and it became his chief activity when an injury put an end to cycling and skiing. He began self-publishing his poetry in 2009, and has produced a book each year since. His work has been included in the Six Sacramento Poets and Late Peaches anthologies, and has been published in the Cortland Review, Susurrus, and The Griffin.
Black Sunday III
The text grew dim, and so I closed my
book and shut my eyes, to muse upon
the things I’d read – about the brave
young flyers in the raid upon Hollandia,
on April 16,1944, that weather men had
counseled should be scrubbed, but stayed
on track, and cost the lives of fifty-four
good men because the promised storms
were realized – and then I wept for all
the dead, and for their senseless sacrifice.
Camacho’s Place
It’s way out in the country – hard to find –
with mixed reviews, but selling salsa to
their Valley clientele time out of mind –
beginning at the end of World War II –
the kind of place you wonder if you want
to go inside when you’ve arrived at last,
and after being seated in the joint,
you’re thinking still that you should take a pass.
You see a sign that says “No Credit Cards.”
The chairs don’t match; the help are overweight.
A noisy reefer sends its kind regards.
The dingy walls are desperate for paint.
Too late. You give your orders, and you wait –
for fish tacos, the best you ever ate.
Ann Conradsen has an MA in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and has studied with Kathleen Fraser, Katherine Harer, Frances Mayes, and Stan Rice, among others. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Magazine, Laurel Review, Transfer, Ink, and The Sacramento Anthology; her critical work has been published in Archives of the San Francisco State Poetry Center, Poetry Now, and Oracle. Living in Sacramento with her son, she obsessively, though perhaps futilely, studies music composition and songwriting.
Rezoning
Day, dusty with sunrise
over the flanked fields.
Promises, already breaking
in the starkening light. Fall.
The egret, still as alabaster
at the overpass. Where water was,
a house. An eddy of houses,
highway, damped thunder of wheels.
Any step, a treachery of an old map.
Every wingbeat, a tracery,
a tributary, whether the foxing of desire
for water or water itself.
Evening, rusty with sirens
and the cries of migratory chaos.
Scatter of flight, a dozen trajectories.
Even the geese have lost their god.
