Laura Wetherington and Jared Stanley
Monday, Jan. 28 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Laura Wetherington has poems in Sonora Review, BathHouse Hypermedia Journal, Fence, Levure Littéraire, Otoliths, Verse, Eleven Eleven, Bombay Gin, Oxford Magazine, and Just Magazine. Poems are forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Drunken Boat, and in a Nightboat anthology, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare. A Map Predetermined and Chance, her first book, was published in 2011 by Fence Books and was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. The Brooklyn Rail called the book “humble, folksy, romantic, tough, inventive, and not over-programmed.” Her chapbook, Dick Erasures, is available as an e-book from Red Ceilings Press. Her current work includes Emily Dickinson erasures and alternative translation techniques.
Wetherington co-founded and currently edits textsound.org. She is a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate English Department, and Cabrillo College. She has taught for the French Ministry of Education, University of Michigan, the New England Literature Program, Eastern Michigan University, and Sierra Nevada College. She is currently the Assistant to the Director of Sierra Nevada College’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. Recent grants include funding from the Nevada Arts Council and the Vermont Studio Center.
This field is a blazon
for Tara Grant
There’s a boundary around her body;yellow lye holds her in the earth in wintertime.
That arm is mine, she sings.
It’s as though she’s floating.
I’m serious, he swore, and buried her leg. He buried her severed head.
This will show the world what it is to cross the line.
I’m not kidding, he said, and smoked the shovel
into her back. When she went down,
he helped her all the way.
This is what it means to love.
I’m not joking, she said, and headed for the door.
Through her teeth she swore, Never again. He agreed.
Jared Stanley is the author of The Weeds and Book Made of Forest, both from Salt Publishing. He is a member of the art collective Unmanned Minerals, and co-edits the magazine Mrs. Maybe. Stanley is a 2012-2014 Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art, and currently teaches at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, NV. He lives in Reno.
Phoenix
I was born to high radiation high
winds and high temperatures
red peaks, lunar imitations and swamp coolers
a place, in other days,
they’d call a desert city
with suffused explanations
and pushy physiography
whatever that is
that’s stuck to my shirtsleeve,
the wistful but empirical grip.
Fiery attentions paid me
in leathery neck wrinkles;
I kept a pistol in my glovebox
to shoot flies off my nose—
there’s no telling what
the aurific rim of particulates
does inside your lungs.
Should you spit them out,
hang saliva from the hairy
crabgrass flowering structure
just like the day I was born
in a town where no town belongs.
My lips become the dry part of my mind
tremendum et fascinans
the wind rolls birdshot
beercans into the gulch: I just assume
it’s the whole crow syllabary
garbled in my throats, that
somehow, across many mountains,
though I only get to heaven
this surly, petulant, and unresolved
something detuned to a mirage-like vibration
playing possum by the side of the road’s
swatches of time-colored jutting,
I was born here, and that explains it:this must be the place
could this be the place?
to spit out the window
and not have the wind blow it
back in our faces.
