GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted By Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
And Printed Matter Vancouver Publisher Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, December 11
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004
printedmattervancouver.com

Featuring Airlie Press Authors Annie Lighthart and Dawn Diez Willis

Annie Lighthart started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. Since those first strange days, she published her poetry collection, Iron String, with Oregon’s Airlie Press and earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. Annie has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and now teaches poetry workshops through Mountain Writers. She lives in a small green corner of Portland, Oregon.

Dawn Diez Willis’s first book of poetry, Still Life with Judas & Lightning, was released this year by Airlie Press. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and has been the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Southern Poetry Review, Dogwood, Poet Lore, the Oregonian and elsewhere. She offers poetry residencies through Salem Art Association and serves as the one-woman staff of the monthly Oregon State Police Officers’ Association Trooper News. Find more information at http://www.dawndiezwillis.com.

For more information on Airlie Press, visit: http://airliepress.org/

ENOUGH
By Annie Lighthart
From Iron String (Airlie Press, 2013)

Sometimes the birds like the bare branch, and later
the cover of leaves. And so it goes: a day of sun, then two
of rain. We are easy with the world and then can no longer be.
And the space between — what lives there? In the middle
of the in-breath and out — where are we just then?
Is there more than silence between chorus and verse?
Is it a compressed galaxy? A pocket of time? Or perhaps
it is more like the comma, dark little hook
on which many things turn. Sometimes it’s enough
to slip into that darkness and just stand there, looking around.
Third Person Sacred
from Still Life with Judas and Lightning
(Airlie Press, 2013)

Sometimes you know a person’s story,
or a piece of it, one sliver of the muscle
examined for its striations and color.
Sometimes you think of your own story
and it is both familiar and not,
and you must question the details,
the slant, the cant of its little roof and shutters
the home of what you know about yourself,
your people, the city, the schools
and afternoons that made you.
There is someone in your field of vision.
Maybe it is you.
Light spills down on the diorama
and something has brought you here to witness
the holy moment, any moment,
with the gulls overhead like sticks
tossed suddenly skyward and crossing
beneath the biting blueness of the sky.