Kathleen Winter and Greg Mahrer
Monday, Sept. 24 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Kathleen Winter’s first full-length collection, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the Antivenom Poetry Prize and was published by Elixir Press in March 2012. Her work is forthcoming in Sentence, 32 Poems, and Cerise Press. Her poems have been published by AGNI, Tin House, The New Republic, FIELD, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Barrow Street and other journals. Kathleen lives in Sonoma County and teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Napa Valley College.
Eve Smoking
That garden we got ourselves towed out of—
did I even want to park there?
With this smoke
I think to replace hunger.
The grocer’s beauty is an echo of yours, lover,
so I avoid the aisles of avocados,
apples, anything with seeds.
But what will break the fast,
and when appearing?
Lately, sublimation’s lost its glamour—
the gesture’s just a drag.
But something continues, combustion of body,
or merely leaves? Paper to ash, a gray drifting
scarf on breath, lust held in the mouth,
the exhalation without swallowing—
and yet, this mimic of abstention
sickens all the same.
If the gangling shadow of desire
is shame, then let me face them: golden husk
of the owl-rung instant before dusk.
Gregory Mahrer’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The New England Review, The Indiana Review, Green Mountains Review, Volt, Colorado Review, Haden’s Ferry Review and elsewhere as well as the web sites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Recently one of his poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and will appear in 25 year anthology from Green Mountains Review His current manuscript, A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent, has been a finalist for the Sawtooth Prize from Ahsahta Press as well as the first book prize from Four Way Books.
Red City
Go toward the red city they said
and we went to where the ground
rose up against the stubborn dark of noon.
Find where the sevens are sown.
We searched inside the throats of thirteen swallows.
What we heard (that everything growing here
vined toward theoretical blue) proved false.
The minutes continued to fall about our sloping shoulders
cuffing our ears like iron kisses.
In the appended churchyard
we traipsed arm in fist
among the twitch and lurch of sprung earth
green camouflaging green.
The elders must have known
the city was on fire when they loosed vandals
from their armoires.
Where the library once stood,
fragments of the 12 known plot lines,
a few loose vowels to take the measure of what was lost.
From here it was a short jaunt to the confessional,
but the booths were full and besides
what was there to confess other than the same tattered narrative:
Once I resided among kettlefish and barricades etc. etc.
Thinking back, salt was too good for us. Pumice and ash
will register the silhouettes of our fabulous lives –
small squalls wrapped in papier måché,
the muzzled pronoun that is I.
