Erica Goss and Parthenia Hicks
Monday, August 26 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Erica Goss is the winner of the 2011 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Contest. Her chapbook, Wild Place, was published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press. In 2010, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. Her poems, articles and reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in many journals, including Connotation Press, Hotel Amerika, Pearl, Passager, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Eclectica, Blood Lotus, Wild Violet, Bohemian Journal, Café Review, Zoland Poetry, Comstock Review, Lake Effect, and Perigee. Erica is a contributing editor for Cerise Press, and writes a column on video poems for Connotation Press. She works as a consultant for Poetry Center San Jose. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com.
The Messenger
The first time I saw her
baby arms ending
in stumps like scoops
of vanilla ice cream
my eyes kept filling in
the spaces where forearms
wrists, hands, fingers were not
as her mother
in whose body
those extremities
failed to grow
tore out the insides
of a baguette
and pressed white morsels
into her child’s mouth
every few years I saw her
a child growing up
those missing forearms
like blunt couplets
like two short puzzles
and every time an empty
place in my heart filled
as if something I didn’t know
I needed had suddenly appeared
last week she walked by me
a tall boy’s arm wrapped
around her shoulders
his palm cupping the stump
that swung by her side like a fin
the sleeves of her dress
two wings of gauze
first appeared in Blood Lotus #16, June 2010.
Parthenia M. Hicks is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Los Gatos, CA and the recipient of the Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship for Literature in the genre of Short Story. She is the recipient of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize and the Villa Montalvo Biennial Poetry Prize and has received Pushcart nominations for poetry and short story. She is a freelance writer and editor with a Masters of Divinity in Kriya Yoga. Her Spoken Word performances include Rumi’s Call and Response; Tonight the Subject is Love; and Requiem for 911. Her recent work is featured in The Call: An Anthology of Women’s Writing; Sweet Obsession: The Art of Lynn Powers and Local Habitations, an anthology of five Bay Area Poets Laureate. Her book of poems, One Night She Swallowed the Moon will be available from Dragonfly Press in 2014.
Hattie’s Food
She stands at the kitchen sink
holding one potato
as though it were an egg.
She cuts the eyes out first
with her mother’s paring knife.
Transparent slices
land in a skillet sprinkled with
butter, salt and pepper.
She listens to the clacking and
popping of the fry
places her chair
in front of the screen door
so she can see the silver maple.
When she eats, she hums.
