GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC

Hosted by Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna

and Printed Matter Vancouver founder Toni Partington

 

September 12, 2013

7pm

Cover to Cover Books

6300 NE St. James Rd.,

Suite 104B

(St. James & Minnehaha)

Vancouver, WA

 

printedmattervancouver.com

christopherjluna@gmail.com

 

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages,

and uncensored since 2004

With our featured readers, Doug Marx and Katharine Salzmann:

 

Doug Marx’s poems have appeared in Harper’s, Willow Springs, The Columbia Review, Alaska Quarterly, and many other publications. His chapbook Sufficiency was an Oregon Book Award Finalist in Poetry. These days he’s a saloon singer, casino rat, and sole proprietor of Grampaw Dawg’s Daycare Center & Boot Camp for Babies, where he takes care of his grandchildren,

Mr. Mu Goes to the Mall

By Doug Marx

Wandering among the computers

Mr. Mu wonders

could he buy a surge protector

for his heart.

Rather, something in him wonders,

worries.

Barely awake this morning

he succumbs to a roadside plum

blossoming pink under a dry gray sky

and swoons,

light-headed as a dandelion gone to seed

for the evolutionary sake

of being plucked by a child and blown away.

 

Katharine Salzmann lives in Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared all over town and beyond, most recently in the online journals Slipstream and Salt River Review. Her two chapbooks, Hemopoiesis (1995, persian pony press) and Prayer Ceremony (2007, persian pony press), will be available for sale at the reading for $15 each. According to the Oregonian: “Human limitation and the apparent schism between mind and matter are absent here . . . . Sensual, sensuous, refusing the either-or categories of Western rationality, this is a poet who apprehends the world in its wholeness, its gift, and gives it back in kind.”

Why

By Katharine Salzmann

So my hands don’t lose their soup

my ladle its dip

or my bones fold into their winged pockets

like a lowering tide. . .

So the endothelial multitude

that is my skin becomes

ferocious with light:

The tiger lily’s speckled cry

at the tip of its only stem.