Frank Graham, Lawrence Dinkins, Rebecca Morrison
Monday, Oct. 12 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley
Currently the Editor-in-Chief of Tule Review, and a poetry editor for Pitkin Review, Frank Dixon Graham has organized poetry events and workshops all over Northern California. An activist for Social Justice, Frank has been a force in the Sacramento poetry community for many years. He leads a popular poetry class at McClatchy Library, and has published a number of chapbooks, including Out on the Reach, (2011). Frank earned an MFA in poetry from Goddard College in Washington State. He and his wife Kym live in Sacramento.
Magnolia Blossom
You read to your child, poems,
picture books, the way the scent
of a magnolia blossom fills the room.
Midnight the fountain is alight,
swans curl around the water.
The long neck of the mother
tells stories to her cygnets –
each page a drop, each book a pond.
Your hand around her hand,
her head upon your chest,
a life outside your lives never exists.
There is no other imagined place.
Lawrence Dinkins (NSAA) is one of Sacramento’s finest poets and performers of poetry, as well as one of our region’s most active citizens when it comes to supporting poetry programs. NSAA hosts third Wednesdays at Mahogany Urban Poets at Queen Sheba Restaurant; he co-hosts the Third Thursday Poetry event (with Mary Zeppa) at the Central Library, and he has fostered numerous creative programs, such as Coffee and Poets at The Naked Lounge, a podcast interview of and by local poets, and Poet vs. Band at the North Laguna Library. Poetry in Davis called him a “dynamic and expressive Sacramento poet whose poems attack injustice and inhumanity.” One of his recent collections is a combination of poetry and art, published by little m press, called Open Mic Sketchbook.
The Gospel of Gun
Adam Lanza kills 20 school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut Friday Dec, 14, 2012
Behold an American gospel
Bullets are the Holy Spirit
Guns are Jesus
Gun-makers are God
Bullets fly through the air, meant to be felt not seen
Spewing from guns like sermons
Delivered like Moses’ stone tablets from the mount
Delivered into the hands of disgruntled, mal-adjusted
Prophets–who lay waste to common places like
John the Baptist wondering through the wilderness
We worship the trinity as one
Bullets, guns, gun-makers
We dare not blaspheme
It is an old church
A church of old white men
The Order of Obsession of Protection
Protection of land from uprising immigrants
Protection from hooded black boys
Protection of unspoken, between-the-lines rights
The innocent that are chosen in blood
Should count themselves lucky
To hear the cry of God themselves in the flesh
“From these cold dead hands”
An evangelist warns from the pulpit
Of the convocation of rifles
How dare politicians try to
Crucify Christ anew
By taking his steel flesh away from us
It is our right to hold Jesus close
In gun holsters, on hips, unconcealed
Where the holy spirit awaits ready to split the red sea
Why not spread this gospel to inner-cities
Why not to the home front
Why not to other countries drowning in violence
—cheaply like Gideon bibles
All should hear of its nine-miller-meter good news
All should hold its semi-automatic wonder
All should feel free to reload
Rebecca Morrison is the editor of eskimopie.net, publishing poetry, art and prose since 2002. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of California. She divides her time between France and California. She curates the Literary Lectures series at the Sacramento Poetry Center and will soon open an art gallery in France which will feature shows and readings by American and French artists and poets. She has published six chapbooks including her most recent book of haikus about France, 92 Berrichon Haiku, which is available on Amazon.com and will be available at the reading for $5.
The Women of Putah Creek
to Break into
the night
with a handful of women
pushing down the fence
dredging up the past
at Putah Creek
flooded our eyes
with her story
alive.
We saw
the creek split past
the family of her body
the town of her eyes
filled with living ghosts
as a bat circled by.
At twilight
we could almost see
the funeral pyre
mother and child
just beneath
the empty reservoir.
Patwin bones
lining the labyrinth of the past
this maze of time
flowing like the creek
across the valley
as night settled
like the Spanish ranchers
(I like this place,
I think I’ll stay)
on the oak-studded land.
We poets,
the Chinese laborers,
dig with our shovels
in the sand,
unveiling ghosts
to make new paths
for the flow of humanity
which rushes by
incessantly
like a freeway
into the night.
