THE LAST YES EVENT OF THE SEASON!
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Jonas Williams is a PhD candidate at SUNY Albany. His fiction has appeared in Columbia: A Journal and elimae. He is working on a book about creative writing pedagogy.
Cast Off
The arm emerged intact from the cast, a gutted plaster marked with autographs. The handwriting was mine, familiar as my dear feet, but the names–Guy Santana, Farshad Gundersen, Isabelle Wyndham-Wyndham–stood for new personalities. Alone in the hospital, I had created these friends, signed them up.
The newly functional arm swung wide the hospital doors, saluted the parking lot, tickled a passing gravida’s belly, and windmilled in the sunlight. Guy Santana, not I, made these gestures, for having signed the plaster contract, he claimed a right to the arm. I make do with the leftover.
I had made friends without bodies. Now I know to share. My erstwhile left leg–toe to thigh, plus buttock–has gone to Farshad. Isabelle has accepted both eyes and a paunch. Guy has the arm, of course, and is otherwise happy with a smatter of neck scruff.
Except he would like my mouth, and as soon as he asks I can’t say no.
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Tara Emelye Needham lives in Albany, NY where she teaches courses in creative writing, literature and cultural theory while pursuing a Ph. D in English at the University at Albany. Tara is a poet, essayist and songwriter who has published, performed and recorded throughout the U.S. for the last eighteen years, including with her bands the Reverse and Mad Planets. Locally, she has performed or read as part of the Million Poems show at the Frequency North Series at the College of St. Rose, the Jawbone reading series, and with Rebecca Wolff and Bernadette Mayer for the Capital District Federation of Ideas. Prior to grad school, Tara worked as an arts administrator and consultant for independent literary publishers, including serving as Program Director at the Council of Literary Magazines in NYC. Way before that, she co-edited the much-beloved grrrl zine Cupsize (with Sasha Cagen). That’s her cat pencil in the photo.
V.
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Chris Tonelli is the author of four chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, The Trees Around, is forthcoming from Birds, LLC. Chris co-curates The So and So Series and teaches at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Allison.
(THEATER)
Objects exist
outside us,
infest us with images.
I protest my senses,
am the size
of all
I haven’t noticed.
Memories,
interior resonance, you
are inventing
new natures.
Mask with no
apertures, I am losing
my emptiness.
The drum in my eye
beats; the arrows in my
quiver.
No theater.
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Janaka Stucky is practicing the perfection of effort while working on silent relationships with knives, whiskey and pugilism. He is also the Publisher of Black Ocean and its literary magazine, Handsome. Some of his poems have appeared in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Free Verse, No Tell Motel, North American Review, Redivider and VOLT. His chapbook, “Your Name Is The Only Freedom,” is available from Brave Men Press.
DESTROY SONG
I want to make a cut
that would sing
how you breathe
next to me—blood
whistling and turned
to ice by the time it hits
the ground.
Unfortunately, Christian Peet & Elena Georgiou are unable to make the trip to Albany today. We’ll reschedule their reading during the spring semester, and are happy to include Anna Elena Eyre as a reader tonight.
Anna Elena Eyre is a Taosena who grew up playing in the crumbling adobes of commune “Reality”. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English/Poetics at SUNY-Albany and received an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2005. Her research is centered on the discursive interface of poetics and politics/biopolitics/animality. She is also interested in the performative aspect of writing in relation to laws and rights. Her chapbook Metaplasmic was published by effing press in 2004 and her creative/critical work has been featured in and is forth coming from Little Red Leaves, Shampoo, Latino Poetry Review, can we have our ball back?, Traffic and Octopus among others.
*After the reading, please join us on a trek to Valentines, where we’ll sing, play, and celebrate Daniel Nester’s new book: How to Be Inappropriate.
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James Belflower is the author of Commuter (Instance Press) and And Also a Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez. He was a finalist for the 2007 National Poetry series and won the 2007 Juked Magazine poetry prize. His work appears, or is forthcoming in: Jacket, EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Apostrophe Cast, LIT, First Intensity, Konundrum Engine and O&S, among others. He curates PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting and exchange of poetry resources.
Ours—
“is 6.2 megapixel
but that’s not what I wanted to show you
look at this. . .it’s been passed around work lately
a coworker has a friend in Texas who works for the. . . some
government agency. . . emailed him this. . .”
truthfully
it
doesn’t terrify me
its grainy, B&W, and the figures don’t scatter
as fast as I would in that schema
so it
is easier to think
they are stupid and deserve
it
but it
hovers with what must be unconsciousness
because each one sluggishly
spasms,
a visual spatter
of small B&W geysers.
_______________________________________
“The stuff I was holding flew out of my hands.”
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Elena Georgiou and Christian Peet are collaborating on a book with various working titles such as “He Bled / She Bled,” “An Improvised Explorative Device,” and “Insurgents in Love.” Georgiou is the author of two poetry collections, Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants and mercy mercy me, and is co-editor of the anthology, The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave. Peet is the author of a forthcoming memoir, No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice: The Story of Jeremy Barney, CT Prisoner #318764; a collection of postcards, Big American Trip; and two chapbooks in an ongoing cross-genre project, The Nines; and is the publisher for Tarpaulin Sky Press.
from “Time to Kill”
The pianist plays Chopin. On the factory floor there are thirty sewing machines with women sitting at them, not yet working, dipping breadsticks covered in sesame seeds into their tea. Move your arm through first to second. Keep pressing your heels into the floor. A huge wooden counter stretches along an entire wall. Underneath it are giant bolts of fabric. Don’t roll. Above it there are electrical wires that connect to an industrial strength cutting machine. Knees open. The factory owner turns on the heat. Resist: push down as your heels push up.
He waits in the truck. There is nothing else to do. There is the factory and there is class. In either, she is working. He is not. He is listening to the radio. The radio announces things. The sun is setting on the Western Empire. Tomorrow will be sunny, with a chance of rain. He has “time to kill.” He has time to put quotation marks around “words”: “producers” and “consumers”; “men, women, and children.” The radio says “the plan.”
It is so cold that she keeps opening and closing her fingers, making fists, trying to stave the growing numbness taking over her hands. Knees open. The three windows overlooking the street do not close; heat leaks out and cold leaks in. Repeat. Car horns seeps through, accenting the slow growl of machines. Move your feet back to first. Don’t let your feet roll. Check each dress from neckline to hemline and cut off every strand of dangling white thread. Lower your arm back to bras bas.
The radio says the plan has been re-drafted. Entering and exiting doors of places of business, people around him are thinking of places other than businesses, thinking of business in which they are not presently engaged, thinking of some time other than the present, some place other than “there.” He has “all the time in the world,” but he has no business there. The radio says a plan has been re-drafted, following “the erasure.” He imagines her looking over her shoulder at the saffron sunset, the reflections in unshattered windows, imagines her turning again to say “Thanks for being here.” The radio says a plan has been re-drafted following the erasure of “a people,” but he can think only of her.
4 pm @ UAG Gallery, 247 Lark Street, Albany
with READINGS FROM:
Josh Potter writes music criticism for Metroland, Relix Magazine, and State of Mind Music, while amassing ideas in a notebook, which he tells himself will one day magically turn into short stories and novels. The few that have done so are available in Pindeldyboz, Thieves Jargon, Elimae, the Taj Mahal Review, and the American Drivel Review. He recently learned, however, that his most enduring literary legacy is for a poem he wrote on the wall of a composting toilet that mocks the poet Mary Oliver.
G. Carl Purcell is a science fiction writer from from Kalamazoo, MI. His writing has appeared in Open City, The 2nd Hand, and on his website, The Supercollider (http://www.noslander.com/supercollider.html). He is a founding member of SF writer’s collective The SIMPLGOS Six. As Greg Purcell, he publishes poetry and curates a reading series out of St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York.
Adam Golaski is the editor of New Genre, a journal dedicated to publishing literary and experimental horror and science fiction. He is the author of Worse Than Myself, a collection of strange stories, and of the upcoming–from Rose Metal Press–Color Plates. He’s co-editor at the poetry press Flim Forum. Adam’s poetry, fiction, and non-fiction will or has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Torpedo, The Lifted Brow, Moonlit, word/for word, McSweeney’s, Strange Tales II & III (from Tartarus Press), Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, Cinnabar’s Gnosis, and LVNG.
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Jono Tosch is a poet in the MFA program at UMass, Amherst. He keeps a food blog called Oil Changes and participates in a national co-authored collage blog called Scrapiteria. His poems have appeared recentlty in notnostrums and GlitterPony.
Poem
Goodnight Wendy Roo,
I need to sleep,
I need to sleep
Like animals sleep,
Like pigs and goats,
Groundhogs and cattle,
And lo lo lo
The caribou.
And lo
The caribou.
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Jessica Fjeld is the managing editor of jubilat. Her chapbook, On animate life, was selected for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship by Lyn Hejinian. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in GlitterPony, Fou, the Boston Review, absent magazine, and Invisible Ear.
You can’t call it Tuesday
You have this way of putting things so they’re true.
You have these gray skies. Open that mouth.
We call them “rock doves.” Come with me
to the challenging place. Put your hands around my waist.
Tiddlywinks. A glass-roofed expanse.
We go for a walk after dark. We have the sound
but not the feeling of rain. I think of terrible
in that way where it means great.
We’re always opening up the small doors our secrets have.
Sometimes the phone rings. Sometimes
a salty green wind blows in.
I’m going to sew gemstones all over this thing.
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Natalie Knight’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Try! H_NGM_N, Octopus, moria, 3by3by3 and Slightly West. Her chapbooks Xenia (Furniture Press: Baltimore, MD) and prairies (Scantily Clas Press: Madison, WI) were published in 2009. Archipelagos is forthcoming from Punch Press: Buffalo, NY. Originally from Western Washington, she lives in Albany, New York and works toward a PhD at University at Albany, SUNY. Her review of Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater is here: http://jacketmagazine.com/38/r-toscano-rb-knight.shtml
nuclear
that nuclear power plant
near the coastline or an
oil drill mars the Montana plains
is not true
“at the end of time the sky will burn like a sheet of paper”
she said
and i’m saying
keep the metal plate in your back
you were born with -
for posterity
and just in case we turn out to be
made of magnets, after all
spinal registers of
the coastal spine landscape of
registered development -
oil sand silt
register my development
register her development, gaia
do something with yourself
for once
so that a consolidation of species isn’t that
bad so that where
species don’t
exist my capitalicity will create them
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Christophe Casamassima is a founder of Towson ARTS Collective, where he is the Director of Literary Arts and editor of Furniture Press. He also teaches in the English department at Towson University. He has recently completed the Proteus Cycle, which includes The Proteus (Moria Books, 2008), Joys: A Catalogue of Disappointments (BlazeVOX, 2008), and Ore (twentythreebooks, 2009). His new books, UNTILTED and Being/Time, will be published by Moria Books and Xerolage in late 2009 and 2010, respectively. In his spare time he repurposes unwanted books and promotes creative literacy through poetry writing and bookmaking workshops. He lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
from Ore.
8
and when we come back we’re floating on
the brilliance of the going on, the loneliness
climbing or falling no one would say
which happiness is? do you hear
What was in my way I cut down.
now we’re senseless
in half a second a sphere a hundred-eighty-six
This new pen hardly works at all
That singing in the streets or was it screams
when I meant fault
is he watching? Is it expired space
and what is I, I love for my I
and what is the word that stands for these things
Or lines on oneself as a pissed off William Blake, the wryness
the harmed who will not harm.
but war, too, is dead as the lotus is dead
and this is the poem I have chosen
and the wildness of it all context. Siam
asleep next to music which renders the mind
from its lone eye a voice sobsinging,
the way the saved look down at the damned,
calling attention, calling. You recall, “Nothing
and the end of loneliness,
the loop meaning safety, meaning me too,
Two breaths, two patterns of echoes.
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Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author of In No One’s Land, judged by DA Powell as winner of the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She has also received awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Vermont Community Foundation, The Willowell Foundation and The Jentel Artist Residency Program, among others. Her second book of poems, The Misery Trail, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press, a memoir in verse–A Book About a Candle Burning in Shed–seeking a home, and a novel, Place No Object Here, nearing completion. Paige lives in rural Vermont, where she works at a Wine Store, edits the poetry magazine A Handsome Journal, and manages her family band, The Blonde Sorrows.
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3 December
It’s not that I can tell the future or know what’s going to happen
in the world. But I can know that certain things are never going
to happen. Fortuity, take note.
Have you ever stood near a fire—a big fire? It’s surprisingly loud.
And hot. Of course, it’s hot. I was thinking maybe I should buy a
piece of tin to hide the baby, to protect the baby.
We come down from the mountains. We brought eggs. Proverbs.
If you see in a field, or in any stretch of dirt, clover. Who buries
a treasure. To him, it means “pause.” To me, it means “others.”
Every contact leaves a trace.
Kate Greenstreet’s second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta Press in September. Her first, case sensitive, was published by Ahsahta in 2006. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Her new work is in current or forthcoming issues of jubilat, VOLT, the Denver Quarterly, Court Green, and Fence. “56 Days” is the title of the second section of The Last 4 Things.
After a wonderful spring of poetry, fiction, artisanal pizza, and new friends, we @ Yes, Reading! are psyched to announce a fall lineup that we hope will further press on into the goodness. (Minus pizza, because the pizza shop is no more.)
All of our events will take place at the Albany Social Justice Center on Central Avenue. Almost all will be on Friday evenings at 7 p.m.
We hope to see you there! Keep monitoring this site for information about our schedule, and as always, feel free to send me an email at n.collen@gmail.com.
