Category Archives: now

Jared Leising

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THE SLOWEST DANCE

 

Last night you raised your hand
to speak about the speed of things

in the film—amazed at how she
takes the time to make tea, iron

a shirt—because you can’t even
take the time to make a sandwich

without forgetting to put something
else, anything, between the bread.

You also spoke of this rush as doing
violence to the self, just a day after

getting word of your cousin’s suicide.
She was a happy woman, you said,

and that you could not reconcile. This
is what I’m trying to reconcile, a thing

slower than domesticity or death: our
embrace at the end of a day—swaying

in the dark exhaust of a parking garage,
like a Muybridge flipbook—still still

still still stillstillstillstillstill still still
still still still.

 

Jared Leising is the author of a chapbook of poems-The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio–and in 2010, Jared curated the Jack Straw Writers Program.  He’s served as president of the Washington Community College Humanities Association and on the Board of Directors for 826 Seattle.  Before moving to Seattle, Jared received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Currently, he’s teaching English at Cascadia Community College and coordinating 826 Seattle’s 2012 adult writing workshop series: “How to Write Like I Do.”

 

Nancy Pagh

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I Like To Be Still
After Pablo Neruda

I like to be still: it is as though there never was
such a thing as waking, and crows beyond the window
are distant as the beaches with private hotels.
No one strips the bedding. No one sweeps the sand.

Everyone chooses not to touch some things.
And the soul of these things goes on dreaming
and seems far away like our own red birth.
I am like the word annunciation.

I like to be still in this room in the morning.
A sleeping cat pushes his back to my spine.
There is nothing to look forward to
so much as fondling his head and the sound he will make.

You misunderstand my silence. All things are my soul
and the quietest things are me most of all. This is true:
I am not entertaining in the way that you want.
My breasts never warranted an exclamation mark.

I like to be still: it is as though there never was
possibility then possibility taken away beyond windows
and stars and the high afternoon so remote like you
and everyone choosing to touch other things.

 

“I Like to Be Still” is reprinted from After (Floating Bridge Press, 2008)

Nancy Pagh has authored two award-winning collections of poetry, No Sweeter Fat (Autumn House Press book award) and After (Floating Bridge Press chapbook competition), and one book of nonfiction (At Home Afloat). Her work appears in numerous publications, including Prairie Schooner, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, The Bellingham Review,and O Magazine. She was born in the island community of Anacortes, Washington, and currently teaches at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

Raúl Sánchez

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Euphoria

 

Tonight

I feel like Huracán Ramírez

Blue Demon, Lucha Libre champions
slamming rudos at the Coliseo

I live for a noche de tango
and red wine, vino tinto
singing with Carlos Gardel
milongas with versos
de Neruda whispered
in the ear de la mujer

the woman I love,

que yo más quiero

I feel like a kid skipping
down rain soaked sidewalks
I feel like sitting on white porch steps

cigar in one hand

Cuban rum in the other
 

I don’t care about piñatas dangling

sticks batting the air

no candy tonight

All the children

safe in bed
 

Running scared from the sacred

called and recalled

I am alone at last

tonight

 

Raúl Sánchez lives in Seattle, where he conducts workshops on The Day of the Dead. His most recent work is the translation of John Burgess’ “Punk Poems”  and his own debut collection, All Our Brown-Skinned Angels, released by MoonPath Press 2012.

Raúl will be reading from All Our Brown-Skinned Angels at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Friday, July 27, at 7:00, along with John Burgess and Lana Hechtman Ayers.

Karen Entrantt

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Baby Girle

 

Baby Girle,
Sit down
Take off ur too-high designer shoes.
Put ur Coach/designer x bag down.
Rub ur hurting feet.
pull them up til the heels can feel the cushion in the chair.
Or Stretch them out on the coffee table–
I know it’s beautiful/fav stuff on it
but juss thys once, push it aside,
Stretch ur feet out & close ur eyes!
And juss be still for a minute.
No music. No ipod. no x-box.
Juss u & ur long loss/neglected friend–
Silence!
No thoughts about ray-ray/nae/niqua/or the dude u really like;
but he don’t know it!
Juss U & Silence.
Silence will guide u, 2
Go upstairs.
Take off all ur
Impressn-my-peopl-gear-so-that-can’t-c-my-fears~
Pull ur hair back.
Wash all the make-up off ur face, body.
Run a hot bubble bath.
Like u used to do back n the day.
No fancy label, juss somethin w/ good bubbles.
Get in & juss submerge all of u
Into the mystery of lathering/soothin/bubbles…
U close ur eyes, surrendering 2 the comfort of the bubbles…
U seemed to have drifted between the wurlds…
U hear a soft soothin voice

But Baby Girle, there are many around u
who never died.
There’s the Ancestral Governing Council
led by Mother Matriarche herself…
The Chief Elders & the Scrybes–
They are where u really came from,
that’s ur tribe!
Scrybes choose to live a different life than most
Becuz they know the real deal–more than most!
Go back 2 letting Simplicity be ur guide also.
She can show u how to look good & not be almost nekit;
she can help u save $ cuz u don’t have 2 buy the new
thing soon as it comes on the market.
She can remind u of ur own inner integrity & that u don’t
have to compromise urself or ur values, juss so ur not alone
or juss so u can have a man hold you through the nite.
She’ll remind u ur worthy of man that’ll be around
in the day-lite 2.
Ur house ain’t on fire, u don’t need a rescue.
In the Silence u will Always be guides what to do..next.
U’ll see u no longer have to sacrifice ur Self-esteem..for—you know what!
U Baby Girle are Worthy of the Best…
U wake up..feelin as though tyme has stood still…
And evry bubble is still in place…
Until u realize those aren’t bubbles, but tears on ur face

 

 

Dr. Karen Entrantt, Ph.D,  is an author, poet-performer, and creative writing instructor. She has been writing poetry and short stories since the 4th grade.  Her style of writing and poetry performances leave audiences sitting on the edge of their seats in anticipation of more!  She has performed at The ACT Theater, Town Hall  with Poetry + Motion.  Her first book is I Found My Voice! (also available on Amazon and various Seattle book stores). Her second book, The Amplification of My Voice: Another level of Expression! will be out August 2012. She lives in Seattle.

 

 

PM5 – Baby Girle from Poetry+Motion on Vimeo.

Marvin Bell

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The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)

Live as if you were already dead.
Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man rode a rhino into Congress.
An odd-toed ungulate in the Congress, and no one blinked.
It was the lobbyist from Hell, the rhino that ate Tokyo, a lightning strike in their dark                     dreams.
A ton of megafauna, and nowhere for a senator to hide.
I’m gonna get you, says the momentum of a rhino.
The rhino has been said to stamp out fires, and the dead man hopes it is true.
He steered the beast to the hotheaded, the flaming racist, the fiery pork-barreler, the                  sweating vestiges of white power.
The dead man’s revolutionary rhino trampled the many well-heeled lawmakers who stood           in the way.
He flattens the cardboard tigers, he crushes the inflated blowhards, he squashes the                cupcakes of warfare.
Oh, he makes them into blocks of bone like those of compacted BMWs.

 

2. More About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man’s rhino was not overkill, don’t think it.
He was, and is, the rough beast whose hour had come round at last.
The dead man’s rhino did not slouch, but impaled the hardest cases among the                            incumbents.
The committee chair who thought a rhino horn an aphrodisiac found out.
The dead man’s rhino came sans his guards, the oxpeckers.
He was ridden willingly, bareback, he did not expect to survive, he would live to be a                    martyr.
The rhino’s horn, known to overcome fevers and convulsions, cleared, for a time, the halls          of Congress.
The senators who send other people’s children into battle fled.
They reassembled in the cloakroom, they went on with their deal-making.
They agreed it takes a tough skin to be a rhino.

 

“The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)” appears in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press.

 

Three books by Marvin Bell were released in 2011: Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon); Whiteout,a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons, (Lodima); and a children’s picture book, based on the poem, “A Primer about the Flag”  (Candlewick). Since 1985, he has split the year between Port Townsend and Iowa City. For many years Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches now for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University, One can see a brief interview with him about writing in the literary video series  “On the Fly,”  and others at Drunken Boat,  Arch Literary Journal, and Poetry Kit.
.

 

 

Kate Lebo

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Every Beginning Wants a Good Place to Start

 

According to laws of ownership,
you’re homeless. According to virology
you’re hunted, sore-throated, snotty.
By psychology you’re understood
and spun out, an iced tire. In fashion
you’re an adopter, a crofter, a little black
smock of sleep.

Notice how roofs lift their houses into reason,
their stories into debt. How leather walks years
after the first bloody cut
and shoes say something faster about a man
than his wallet because you don’t
have to ask to see them.

Starting today, you’ll study the discipline
of what you don’t know
about what you don’t want. You want this
like the flu wants lungs. Today,
keep it simple when simple makes sense.
Don’t start with schoolbooks. Start
with breakfast.

 

Kate Lebo’s poems appear in Best New Poets 2011, Poetry Northwest, Bateau, and The Pacific Poetry Project, among other anthologies and journals. She’s an editor for Filter, a literary journal made entirely by hand, and the recipient of a Nelson Bentley Fellowship, a 4Culture grant, and a Soapstone residency. Currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington, Kate hosts a semi-regular semi-secret pie social called Pie Stand whenever schoolwork allows. Visit Pie-Scream for more about Kate’s zine A Commonplace Book of Pie and other tasty treats.

Tina Schumann

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Autumn

 

You know how the world comes at you like that?
You’re driving down some tree-lined street
with Vivaldi or Corelli
lilting their way from the radio.
The sun casting prisms on the leaves,
the leaves easy in their fall.
All questions have quieted.
You are convinced that even the asphalt is happy
to be what it is: solid, stoic, the backbone of a day.
Up ahead the next three lights are green,
you are passing the school yard at St. Paul’s
and all the kids in their blue and green uniforms
are bright angels, bearers of light.
There goes Stone Way Cleaners where they are steaming and pressing,
steaming and pressing just for you. The world is stuck
on go, proceed, avanti. No one could imagine
how enlightened you’ve become
in the cabin of your car, on the rim of tears
with your velocity of awe, your clarity at the wheel,
your rapid rolling toward some small truth, on and on like that.

 

 

Tina Schumann’s poem “Autumn” originally appeared in Harpur Palate. Her manuscript As If (Parlor City Press) was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize for 2010. Her work was a finalist in the 2011 National Poetry Series. She received the 2009 American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal and honorable mentions in The Atlantic Monthly 2008 Poetry Contest as well as the 2010 Crab Creek Review contest. She is a Pushcart nominee and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems have appeared in various publication including The American Poetry Journal, Ascent, Cimarron Review, PALABRA, PARABOLA, Poemeleon, Raven Chronicles and San Pedro River Review. She lives in Seattle.