The Day Before

The Day Before

Today is no different
and will pass without a word,
will holler and vanish in a storm cloud
that in a season
will return us calm tides and birds.

The shells spiraling toward center
could as easily be heading away.
Is that not reason enough to rejoice?

*

What low tide lays bare
might not be expected
but someone once pitched
everything we find here into the sea,

making this act of rediscovery
its own strenuous abandonment.

*

If we could not remember
the day before
would the waves speak
a less weighty dialect?

Without history would its torchbearers
pine like the rest of us
for definition
and for an image of ourselves
tomorrow?

Without love’s deeds and its failures
would I be left wondering alone by the sea
why the severity of my hands?


-published by Arlington Literary Journal

Open Mic This Monday!!

Open Mic this Monday, Sept. 28, at Three Friends Coffeehouse (201 SE 12th Ave, Portland, OR). Sign up begins at 8pm, mic at 8:30pm. Shawn, Tola, and I will be there, representing the Caravan...I'm unsure what to read, but perhaps some new work, which tend to be shorter and more idea/concept-based...alas, we'll see...
The Show and Tell Gallery, which hosts the mic, can be found at http://showandtellgallery.org.

Albina Press Coffeehouse- New Meetup Location

So, Moonlit Poetry Caravan is trying out a new location for our Thursday night meetings. We'll be at:
Albina Press Coffeehouse
5012 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Portland, OR 97215

Hopefully this locale, of which I've heard many good things and being closer to downtown, will be more suitable to some. Fingers crossed...

Our next meeting is Thursday, Oct 1!

Bad Dancing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY

After watching this in my Graduate Mentoring Training at Portland State University, I felt wholly inspired and filled with both love and, well, a desire to dance poorly, to just embrace, and embrace boldly...please watch...and enjoy....

Seven Cirlces Press- 3 Poems!

Great news! Seven Circles Press, an online and print journal, has accepted three poems for publication: " Accident Of Clouds", " Village South Of The River" and "A Song Without Music". They will be available in print Feb 2010 and online soon at www.sevencirclespress.com.

I'm Reading Sunday's Headlines....

More wonderful news this week! One of my newer poems within my chapbook "The House We Live In", still attempting publication, has been accepted by New Verse News. This chapbook is mainly a series of questions, poltical and social, and is a search for their answers. The poem "I'm Reading Sunday's Headlines That Call for Things Like Justice" is now headlining at http://newversenews.blogspot.com. Please help support and check it out. Comments, as always, are more than welcome...

March 4th on September 11th

After a long conversation last night with two fellow conspirators, friends, and poets bent on removing the astro turf on the uneven playing field of contemporary poetry, I am excited to find Folly Magazine, an online and print journal of poetry and aesthetics, has accepted my poem March 4th. Awaiting word as to publication date. But please check out their website at www.follymag.com...

Infidelities at Mad Poets Review

Upon return from Vienna I have happily found Mad Poets Review will be publishing my poem Infidelities in their upcoming Fall 2009 print edition. Website: www.madpoetssociety.com.

Confessional Hymns x2

Please check out the new September online issue of Stirring: A Literary Collection, www.sundress.net/stirring, where my poem Confessional Hymns has been published for a second time.

CONFESSIONAL HYMNS


Bless us, fertile new morning.

Bless the barrage of tangerine light
streaming through the thawing pines.
Bless the slight wisps penetrating within
these bedroom windows,
balancing upon her forehead.

To whoever misses the conch’s hermetic ocean voice
grinding and honking down the avenues,
bless those ears pressed to concrete
who know history never fully unfurls.

Bless the gathering hummingbirds
who resuscitate night’s lost shadows,
swarming into a single crab
splayed across our bedroom wall,
legs furiously kicking the air.

Bless the beasts conquered and belly up,
accepting without pretense the slaughter and their breath.
Bless all the things each sea coughs up.
Bless their ignorance, their well-lit tree within.
Bless the bountiful cold waves
sleep polishes our wounds,
our nightly flight taken with Icarus
and our awaking moments before the sea opens its mouth.

Bless the moment between waking and understanding,
when such purity of new morning blinds us
to what the night undid.

The Moonlit Poetry Caravan- this Friday

Date:
Friday Sept. 4, 7pm

Location:
Cafe Delirium
308 N Main Ave
Gresham, OR 97030

Portland, OR upcoming reading- friend and cohort A. Molotkov to be reading

Oregon Literary Review co-hosts First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting at the Blackbird Wine Shop, 3519 NE 44th off Fremont, 7-9pm. This show is 21 and over. Contact Julie Mae Madsen at maemadsen@gmail.com for more information.

The readers for September 2 are Bruce Greene, David Cooke, Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk, A. Molotkov, & Evan Cooper.

This night features writers of a successful Portland writing group The Guttery (http://www.theguttery.com/)

Bruce Greene taught for 33 years at an urban high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a teacher-consultant for the Bay Area Writing Project at UC Berkeley for the last 20 years, he’s published numerous articles on educational issues in his own practice as well as personal essays based on his experiences and observations. An avid thoroughbred horse lover, and frequent contributor to The Blood-Horse magazine, he served as Northern California correspondent from 1985-2000. Bruce now lives and writes in Portland, Oregon and is currently looking for three new streams to fly fish, two more coffeehouses conducive to writing, and one literary agent for his recently completed memoir, Above This Wall: The Life and Times of a VISTA Volunteer 1969-70.

David Cooke is a former middle school special education teacher who operates a landscape maintenance business aptly named The Lawn Guy. He is a founding member of two writing groups– Leora: A Writing Group and The Guttery. He graduated from both the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Portland State University Masters of Special Education program. Raised Catholic in Oakland, California, he now resides in Lake Oswego, Oregon with painter, Jessica Acevedo. His debut as the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize winner is available in The Hunger Mountain Journal online and in print. He is currently compiling a chapbook entitled Discretion.

Before landing in Portland, Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk lived all over. She learned kickboxing in Turkey, faced-off with a rhino in Nepal, discussed the weather with Queen Elizabeth in England, and was chastised by Mother Theresa in India. She’s now proud to declare herself a coffee mug carryin’, microbrew drinkin’, Powell browsin’, environmental stumpin’, trail hikin’ Portlander. She writes novels about the adventures that occur when the will of the individual and the collective muscle of a culture clash.

A. Molotkov is a writer, composer, filmmaker and visual artist. Born in Russia, he moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. He is the author of several novels, short story and poetry collections and the winner of the 2008 E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award. The winning story “Round Trip” has been nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Award and accepted by Intramel for publication in Italian. A. Molotkov’s poetry and short stories have appeared in over a dozen publications, both in print and online. Visit him at www.AMolotkov.com

Evan Cooper is a writer of fiction. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from Willamette University and an M.A. in Media and Culture from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He often rolls them up and uses them for house fly-icide and K-9 reprimands. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.