Kathleen Winter and Shawn Pittard
Monday, Oct. 10 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at R25
Host: Emanuel Sigauke
Kathleen Winter‘s first collection of poems won the Antivenom Poetry Prize and will be published by Elixir Press in 2012. Her poems are forthcoming in AGNI, Southeast Review, VOLT, and have been published by The New Republic, Tin House, FIELD, The Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, New American Writing and other journals. Kathleen was awarded fellowships by The Vermont Studio Center and Prague Summer Program. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a law degree from UC Davis. She lives in Glen Ellen, CA, with her husband Greg Campbell.
Jellyfish Elvis
When my aunt by marriage Aunt Noreen
was in the beach movie with Elvis and she said his toenails were too long
I used to think it all was her, he couldn’t be the slob she took him for,
that all that crap about his breath being a bomb,
his table manners like an Army mess,
his undershirts rust-stained and even his eyebrows permanently out of whack
was just a bunch of sour grapes that she cooked up
to balance for the fact that she was cut out of the picture after it had wrapped,
in spite of how it hardly was her fault about the man-o-war
that stung her shin during the kissing scene with Elvis and a couple other girls
when he was grabbing her around her waist
and had his tongue she swears half down her throat
when like a fireball or a billion ant bites all at once
the tentacle associated with her leg.
And naturally without a chance to think about it–even to cry out–
she bit him, hard.
But other stuff’s come out about him, pills and funny sandwiches,
and dry old bird she is, Noreen still has the scar.
— Kathleen Winter
Shawn Pittard is the author of two chapbook collections of poems, Standing in the River, winner of Tebot Bach’s 2010 Clockwise Competition, and These Rivers, from Rattlesnake Press. He lives in Sacramento.
River Psalm
Tule fog threads the red tips
of bone-gray willow stalks. Water lisps
in an eddy’s clot, cackles through the riffles.
The murmur of crows descends on a downdraft.
The sand and gravel bar below the bridge —
inscribed by braided streams — is a mosaic
of polished stones, lost feathers, the skeletons
of spawned-out salmon: a cuneiform of death and drift.
How many mornings have I stepped into this river,
felt its inexorable pull — a muted ache
unspool and old affliction that never found redress.
And how many mornings have I watched the fog
gleam radiant with the sunrise —
a luminous blizzard of refracted light:
an alchemy, a transubstantiation.
— Shawn Pittard
