2 poems by Steffi Drewes
Only Wasps Come When We Call for Robins
Sunspots arrive
beating furious the front door
hello gunpowder
hours later fireworks will splinter
sounds over telephone wires
goodbye fresh strawberries
everything plump and cold
in a wire basket
will enter the sky
and rot from above
•
Sunlight through screen
makes a system of pulleys
in theory, in practice:
my puppet dull limbs
lie mute
clutching the receiver
now repeat after me:
our brave shoulder, he’s
too much burnt rubble
boxed love handles
missing a heartbeat
but I meant to say, mother
hello sweet heroine or aha! heliotrope
the shirt when I am an old woman I’ll wear
violet bloodstones
facing sun and wearing thin
where I sit
and imitate your profile
steadily hammering
stone into silk
•
Fear you’ve woven
too much muffled longing
fallen still
stained glass posture
drawing shapes in a dark room
because home is where
we learned to say:
he’s gone, gray trace
learned, nearly 2000 miles
after you dialed, to howl
—pretty bones and all—
I’m dead at both ends
Bay Point Trigger Finger
There I go again
born from a bubbly underbelly
envision this tunnel
swift incision under
my glass eye
my goose-necking
at gorgeous white cranes
grim giants, giraffing the city
the baited slate sky
climbs another steel notch
today’s etched on my scalp
where some pigeon shit piled
and still clouds my periphery
pretend it’s a crown
it’s a critical gesture
a little elbow jutting
outturned pockets
never hurt anyone’s
gut ego subway diatribe
gimme another inch
finding brutish windows
tagged by fogbreath
you call this weather?
what’s all this birdish
knocking tooth and tail and
why this feather-stained smile
you ask? A fear of falling
in love with old oil drums
soot-smudged caboose
or thug-boned tugboats.
I’m speaking of rooms
where the water lines are
dotted white a shockproof forecast
our time locked in sheer threads
Since when is my gait jaunty
my jousting rod
hammer-tooth jaw so ready
squashing ants with one hand
or purse-snatching
stale gum
Since when is my gameface
gawk-worthy
daily draw a poker hand
of Siamese twins
the east coast
the west boasting
sailboats or snake eyes
swallow and repeat
the odds just get odder
the sun gets wiped clean
and oh, the brilliant bubble people
in brittle spit-shined shoes
going surefire apeshit
in bullet-shaped cars
make their mad bee-hive drive
up into the hills, honey
where every smirk in the saddle is
a bully’s wet dream
talking buttercups and sunsets, baby
your cheeks burst, aglow
So that when I say
come trundle me under
I mean thumb-tucking
belt loops, sweating soupbowls
if we’re set on spinning
our bottle cap eyelids
let’s just get beaked up
broth into a trance
Steffi Drewes currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a contributing poetry editor for MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine. Some of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bombay Gin, Phoebe, Shampoo, American Letters & Commentary, and BlazeVOX, among others. Her manuscript, Wheel to Wing, was selected as a finalist for Switchback Books’ 2008 Gatewood Prize.
October 18, 2009
Savage Materiality
Christine Hume reviewed Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal, A Project for Future Children in the September/October 2009 issue of the American Poetry Review. Hume tells us that “[the body is] the book’s ultimate subject” and she calls the book “amniotic”.
In this feedback loop, Humanimal offers the body as a model of articulation, making a case for experience as a distinct form of meaning. Once Kapil frees her subjects from concept and returns them to the savage materiality of existence, they wander restlessly back and forth. Across species and cultures, Kapil’s’ characters co-shape one another in layers of reciprocating complexity.
Hume even ventures that the physiology of the reader shifts when crossing the Humanimal threshold, face and book intersecting as myriad-dimensional planes.
Check it out in the latest issue of APR!
Purchase Humanimal from KSP!
October 17, 2009
Robert Glück & Carol Mirakove. Sunday, October 18th, 2009
6:30 pm, $5
21 Grand: 416 25th St. (at Broadway), Oakland
newyipes.blogspot.com
Carol Mirakove is the author of Mediated (Factory School), Occupied (Kelsey St. Press), and, with Jen Benka, 1,138 (Belladonna). She released the single “temporary tattoos” with the Dutch musician bates45 and she collaborates with the Lebanese DJ [IN]Head-Kay. Carol recently moved to Oakland from Brooklyn.
Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Glück edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück was Co-Director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center, Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. His poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies,The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. His critical articles appeared in bookforum, artforum international, Aperture, Poetics Journal, and Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, and he prefaced Between Life and Death, a book on the paintings of Frank Moore. Last year he and artist Dean Smith completed the film Aliengnosis. Glück teaches at San Francisco State University.
October 14, 2009
Small Press Traffic hosts an evening with Renee Gladman
NAHL HALL, CCA CAMPUS, OAKLAND
5212 Broadway, Oakland
Event begins at 7:30pm
$8-15 sliding scale; members FREE
Renee’s most recent book is Toaf (Atelos, 2008) See her other titles here.
October 7, 2009
See S E C O N D Language, an artist book by Kathleen Fraser, JoAnn Ugolini, and Don Cushman
A note from Don Kushman
Dear friends of Kathleen Fraser, JoAnn Ugolini, and Don Cushman,
On the very recent heels of KF’s presentation at Kelly Writers House (UPenn) of our recently completed Artist’s Book, S E C O N D LANGUAGE, A Construction in Collaboration, worked on this spring in a studio at The American Academy in Rome, we’ve been offered a rare opportunity to sell the original version to a superb Special Collection on the East Coast–focused on Artists’ Books– but must ship the original copy to NYC by Monday next.
With this sudden deadline came the realization that many of our local writer/painter/book artist friends would have no chance to see the original, so we’ve improvised a “showing” of our unique hand-pasted book–to be unfolded in its total codex length (20 pages/ 40 sides)–on a long table in JoAnn’s Berkeley studio at 1422 A Bonita Ave (between Rose & Vine), next Sunday afternoon, from 3 to 5 pm…in the hopes that at least some of you can have a look. There will also be an exact replica of the book–JoAnn’s artist copy–on a separate surface, for you to look at and read at your leisure, with a glass of wine waiting for you in the kitchen (away from
the hand-pasted pages).
You are invited to a viewing of SECOND LANGUAGE a collaboration between Kathleen Fraser and JoAnn Ugolini
Sunday October 11, 3 to 5 pm
Cloud Marauder Press
1422a Bonita Ave
Berkeley, Ca
October 5, 2009
KSP blogger Michelle Puckett maps Forces
The following is a brief sojourn into a reading of Guest by Mills MFA in Writing student, Michelle Puckett. KSP has just reprinted Forces. It is available in paperback and hard cover. For more unique perspectives on Guest’s work, her life and times, tune into KSP’s interview series with Hadley Guest.
