Wendy Williams and Kara Synhorst
Monday, April 14, 2014 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Wendy Williams is a member of the Red Fox Poets Underground Collective of the Sierra Foothills though now she lives in the Sacramento burbs. She has two chapbooks, Bayley House Bard and Some New Forgetting. Her poem “Winged Victory” will appear online in Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, spring 2014 issue. Her blog, www.restoryyourlife.com, features inspiring and informative words and original artwork that help people cope with early trauma and post-traumatic stress.
That they came back to us
That each year they arrive
That they stand taller, legs stronger
That they cling to the rafter, looking
down and all around for their old nest
as if puzzled
That they do not build here again after the jay
chased them
That they are beautiful, especially the male
with his peach-red chest, throat and head
That they have remained together for years
That out of all the places in the Universe,
they come here
That they love us. No.
That they are themselves. They are what they are—
That pair of finches.
Kara Synhorst is a lifelong Sacramentan who has never lived more than seven miles from her childhood home. She got her B.A., teaching credential, and M.F.A. from CSU Sacramento and now teaches English at Luther Burbank High. She lives with her husband Reza and daughter Azadeh and two ornery cats. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Now, Convergence, The Found Poetry Review, unFold, Phantom Kangaroo, the Sacramento News and Review, and Susurrus.
Middle of an Eon
These rocks, called mudstone,
look like erosion in process,
as window-glass fissures appear,
then break, then they lay
in piles on the beach like
the fat sidewalk chalk
after the rowdy neighbor boy
has stomped them.
They look like evolution,
the processes of nature,
the long march of time
and science, and in them are both
mountains and sand,
the past and future,
like a little sign saying
“this is the middle of an eon.”
They smell like carbon dating,
they taste of geology classes,
they feel like arrowheads,
and they look like god was involved.
