Kelly Davio and Stefanie Freele
Monday, March 18 at 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center at 1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Kelly Davio is Managing Editor of The Los Angeles Review, Associate Editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal, and a reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been honored in Best New Poets, and she has published poems in journals including Gargoyle, The Cincinnati Review, Bellingham Review, Pank, and others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, Whidbey Writers’ Workshop, and teaches English as a second language in the Seattle area.
Electromagnetic Compatibility
I am the conduit of all transmission.
The basebands of noise radiate from my skull.
I hear the faint buzz when I bend a knee
all the way to one hundred and eight megahertz.
My right hand taps the cool rhythm
of amplitude modulations; between the joints
of my smallest toes, a call-in talk show
pushes along my connective tissues.
Top-forty hits in mono and stereo
bisect my stomach, love handles jiggling
the fifty-two stories from local news breaks,
three weather reports, and a sponsorship message
from Lucky Charms. Their delicious magic
pulses, circumnavigates my navel.
A teleconference connected through my veins’
satellite rattles the back of my neck.
I shimmy shoulders, show my displeasure
when I tire of rasp in a haggler’s voice,
cast a web of white noise through my spine.
When I’m through with public broadcast pledge drives,
I listen for the red giants’ white signal,
static issued from billions of years of brilliance
from the center of the molecular bang.
All of it vibrating, all of it humming in bones.
Originally appeared in Cincinnati Review
Stefanie Freele’s latest short story collection; Surrounded by Water (Press 53) includes the winning story of the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. Her first collection, Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press) was a finalist in the John Gardner Binghamton University Fiction Award and the Book of the Year Award. Stefanie’s published and forthcoming work can be found in magazines such as Witness, Sou’wester, Mid-American Review, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West, The Florida Review, American Literary Review, Night Train, Edge, and Pank. www.stefaniefreele.com
The Topography of a Wake
To avoid her husband’s casket, Virginia counts her family members and places them outside in the landscape.
Her brother Ralph, maroon-faced with bourbon, brashing opinions, is a mudslide over a main road, seeking attention by holding back cars.
Messy, earthy, and ridiculously unpractical.
Joking, straight-spined, her brother Hal, the mouth of a river, almost inviting for a swim, almost soothing, except for the kelp or seaweed or whatever you call that knotted green stuff on the shore, bubbly and smelly.
Sister Susan, following Hal’s lead, surrounds him with amenable laughter. As a natural dam, she prevents salmon from spawning, even though it is known they might not survive.
Flitting through the kitchen in her barely clothed sinewy body, Virginia’s sister-in-law Sheryle, the scrappy beginnings of a tumbleweed, bends to pick up dust no one sees.
Virginia avoids the eyes of the avoiders to watch her mother orchestrating. Mother has become those ants that evade an ant trap, meandering on the kitchen counter, mingling in the fruit bowl. Traipsing in an irrefutable line toward the sugar jar.
Outside somewhere, her father, long dead, that mountain in the distance, prominent from every angle, until an avalanche of infection sheared off the top, without giving anyone much time to run.
Her husband lies silently in the casket, as silent as he was in life, an alpine lake, one she found hiking. He was clear and unexpected, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. No one believed her that the lake existed; they didn’t want to make the hike.
Virginia disintegrates the walls, the family. They fall away with the swiftness of a New Mexico lightning storm. The house is gone, revealing merely the pink sky and her husband, barely visible above the casket edge. Just his nose and one eyebrow.
She inches down a little in her chair and the nose dips behind the horizon of the black casket, leaving only Virginia, an uncharted archipelago floating birdlessly in the kelly-green sea.
Originally appeared in Cezanne’s Carrot
