Tag: Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic

Christopher Luna and Toni Partington’s Honeymoon Reading Tour of California (August 26, 27, 30)

August 8, 2015

Toni hand on Chris bw by Colin

Toni Partington and Christopher Luna

Photo by Colin Poellot

Clark County, WA Poet Laureate Christopher Luna and Toni Partington, co-hosts of the popular Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in Vancouver, WA and co-founders of Printed Matter Vancouver, are celebrating their recent marriage with a honeymoon road trip and reading tour of California that will bring them to Monterey, San Francisco, and Berkeley. Christopher and Toni are very grateful to each of the event organizers for hosting them. They look forward to reading for old friends and making some new friends as they pass through. Each will have copies of their books and chapbooks for sale at the readings listed below.

Monterey

Rubber Chicken Poetry Slam and Open Mic
Featuring Newlyweds
Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
& Printed Matter Vancouver publisher Toni Partington
On their Honeymoon Tour of California

7:30 pm
Wednesday, August 26
East Village Coffee Lounge
498 Washington St
Monterey, CA 93940
831-373-5601

Hosted by Garland Thompson Jr.

East Village Coffee Lounge

Facebook Event Page for Monterey Reading

San Francisco

Bird and Beckett four shot

Two-Tone Poetry & Jazz
CD LAUNCH PARTY!

David Meltzer & Julie Rogers
with Zan Stewart on Saxophone
and Clark County, Washington Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
& Printed Matter Vancouver Publisher Toni Partington

CD’s & books will be available!

Thurs., August 27 2015
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

BIRD & BECKETT BOOKS AND RECORDS
653 Chenery St., San Francisco, CA in the Glen Park area
415-586-3733

Bird & Beckett Books and Records

Facebook Event Page for San Francisco Reading

MELTZER & ROGERS PR PHOTODavid Meltzer, celebrated SF Renaissance/Beat poet is a teacher & has published over forty books of poetry, fiction, and anthologies. This is his second poetry CD in 58 years. Meltzerville

Julie Rogers, northwest poet, is a writing coach & has published several chapbooks, a hospice manual & a selected, ‘House of the Unexpected’. This is her first poetry CD. Julie Rogers

Zan Stewart, tenor saxophonist & teacher, won the celebrated ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award. His band’s debut CD, ‘The Street Is Making Music’, is on Mobo Dog Records. Zan Stewart

Christopher Luna by Julian Nelson 2 November 2013

Christopher Luna is Clark County’s Poet Laureate, a teacher, co-founder of Printed Matter Vancouver, and co-hosts Vancouver’s Ghost Town Poetry series. Poetry: Christopher Luna in Ghost Town, USA

Toni-Partington2009

Toni Partington is co-founder of Printed Matter Vancouver, co-host of Ghost Town Poetry, and is an author, editor, writing coach, and artist.

Berkeley

California poets Neeli Cherkovski and Richard Loranger
join Christopher Luna and Toni Partington for their Honeymoon Reading Tour

Neeli Cherkovski
Richard Loranger
Christopher Luna
Toni Partington
+ a brief open mic

Hosted by Richard Loranger

Clark County, WA Poet Laureate Christopher Luna and Toni Partington, co-hosts of the popular Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in Vancouver, WA are celebrating their recent marriage with a honeymoon road trip and reading tour of California that will bring them to Berkeley, Monterey, and San Francisco.

The late spoken word legend Jack McCarthy called Ghost Town Poetry “the best open mic between Tacoma and Berkeley.”

Sunday, August 30, 2015
Art House Gallery
2905 Shattuck Ave.
(one block north of Ashby, and close to Ashby BART)
Berkeley, CA

signup 5 pm
start 5:15
$5-10 donation requested, no one turned away for lack of funds

Art House Gallery & Cultural Center
Neeli Cherkovski’s Facebook Page
Richard Loranger

Facebook Event Page for Berkeley Reading

PERFORMER BIOS

Neeli

Neeli Cherkovski has written biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and Charles Bukowski, with whom he co-edited the Los Angeles zine Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. Cherkovski produced the first San Francisco Poetry Festival, and in the early-1990s helped to found Café Arts Month, a yearly event celebrating San Francisco’s cafe culture. Cherkovski is the author of Whitman’s Wild Children, a collection of essays about twelve poets he has known: Michael McClure, Charles Bukowski, John Wieners, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, William Everson, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, Jack Micheline, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Cherkovski was a writer-in-residence at the New College of California in San Francisco. He taught literature and philosophy there until the school closed in 2008. His body of poetry includes Animal, Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Leaning Against Time, for which he was awarded the 15th Annual PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2005. Cherkovski’s papers are housed at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Richard Loranger and Christopher Luna by Jane Ormerod November 17 2012

Richard Loranger and Christopher Luna in November 2012

Richard Loranger is a writer, performer, visual artist, and all around squeaky wheel, currently residing in Oakland, CA. He is the author of Poems for Teeth, as well as The Orange Book and nine chapbooks, including Hello Poems and the recent 6 Questions (Exot Books). Recent work can be found in Out of Our #17, in the anthology I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand (great weather for MEDIA), and in the online journals London Grip New Poetry (www.londongrip.co.uk) and The Marsh Hawk Review (www.marshhawkpress.org). You can find more about his work and scandals at http://www.richardloranger.com.

Clark County, WA Poet Laureate Christopher Luna is the co-founder, with Toni Partington, of Printed Matter Vancouver, an editing service and small press that serves Northwest writers. Together Luna and Partington edited Ghost Town Poetry volumes one and two, featuring poems from the popular open mic poetry reading series that Luna established in 2004. Luna’s books include Brutal Glints of Moonlight, GHOST TOWN, USA and The Flame Is Ours: The Letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure 1961-1978. Recent publications include Bombay Gin, Unshod Quills, It’s Animal But Merciful, gape-seed, Take Out, Chiron Review, and Soundings Review. To learn more about Christopher Luna, please visit http://christopherluna-poetry.blogspot.com.

Toni Partington lives and works as a poet, editor, publisher, visual artist, and writing coach in Vancouver, Washington. Toni has a B.A. in Social Work and an M.A. in Humanities with a focus on literature and literary editing. She is the author of two books of poetry, Jesus Is A Gas (2009), and Wind Wing (2010). Her poetry has been published in numerous journals including The Cascade Journal, VoiceCatcher (editions 3 and 4), OutwardLink.net, and Perceptions. She was Co-Editor for the 2011/2012 VoiceCatcher anthology of Pacific NW women writers. Toni is co-founder and editor of Printed Matter Vancouver, an editing and small press imprint (www.printedmattervancouver.com). Toni co-hosts the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic, a popular poetry reading series in Vancouver, WA founded by her husband Christopher Luna.

The Columbian acknowledges Printed Matter Vancouver’s Christopher Luna and the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in “Clark’s Growing Literary Community”

June 29, 2015

Had a great time at the Gallery 360 Book Fair. I used my New York voice to coax people onto the porch. So fun to be shouting in Vancouver, WA. You should try it some time, it’s good for the soul. Thank you to Peggy Bird for organizing this event and inviting me to participate. I really enjoyed hanging out on the porch of the Slocum House with authors Victoria Lindstrom and Kriston Johnson and gabbing with the people of Ghost Town about poetry and literature. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hello and/or buy a few books: Lori Loranger, Bruce Hall, Karen Goysich Read, Rainy Knight, Christi Krug, Maureen Andrade, Jim Martin, Shawn Morrill, Erica Marchbank, Erin Dengerink, Angie Lindquist, and Ian Caton. We had perfect weather and an enormous crowd at the park. I hope that Gallery 360 decides to host more events like this in the future.

Peggy and Christopher at Gallery 360 Book Fair by Maureen Andrade
Gallery 360 Book Fair organizer and author Peggy Bird with Christopher Luna. Photo by Maureen Andrade for the Columbian

Many thanks to Maureen Andrade of North Bank Artists Gallery and the Columbian for this account of the event:

Clark County’s Growing Literary Community

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Herb Stokes at Angst Gallery May 14, 2015

April 12, 2015

Ghost Town Flyer May 14 2015

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, May 14
Angst Gallery
1015 Main Street
Vancouver, WA 98660
LGBTQ-FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004

christopherjluna@gmail.com

Herb at GT December 11 2014 by Tiffany
Herb Stokes at Cover to Cover Books in December 2014 Photograph by Tiffany Burba-Schramm

Featuring Herb Stokes: Upon retirement from Swissair New York, Herb Stokes and his artist wife, Marianne, moved to the Intracoastal Waterway in North Carolina. They did the boat and beach scene for several years but after a wonderful summer trip to Portland decided the Northwest would be their home. He took an ongoing creative writing course at Clark College and hasn’t stopped writing since.

From “SALAD FOR TWO”
By Herb Stokes

We sat at a too small table
on a sun washed terrace
overlooking the Mediterranean
drinking wine from pewter goblets.

A blue haze was in the air
and in your eyes.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic at Angst Gallery celebrates National Poetry Month with a bilingual reading featuring Los Portenos founding member Cindy Williams Gutierrez Thursday, April 9

March 20, 2015

Ghost Town Flyer April 9 2015

Printed Matter Vancouver and Leah Jackson Present
GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Downtown in the Vancouver Arts District
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington

7pm
April 9, 2015
Angst Gallery
1015 Main Street
Vancouver, WA 98660

With our Featured Reader Cindy Williams Gutierrez:

Cindy WIlliams Gutierrez poet

Cindy Williams Gutierrez

Photo by Russell J. Young

Selected by Poets and Writers Magazine as one of the top ten 2014 Debut Poets, poet-dramatist Cindy Williams Gutiérrez draws inspiration from the silent and silenced voices of history and herstory. Her poetry collection, the small claim of bones, was published by Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press. Poems and reviews have appeared in Borderlands, Calyx, Harvard’s Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Periódico de poesía, Portland Review, Quiddity, Rain Taxi, Rattle, and ZYZZYVA. Plays include Words That Burn, which premiered in Milagro’s 2014 La Luna Nueva festival to commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month and the William Stafford Centennial, and A Dialogue of Flower & Song featured in the 2012 GEMELA (Spanish and Latin American Women’s Studies) Conference co-sponsored by the University of Portland and Portland State University.

Cindy earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast Program with concentrations in Mesoamerican poetics and creative collaboration. Cindy is a founding member of Los Porteños, Portland’s Latino writers’ collective, and the founder of Grupo de ’08, a Northwest collaborative-artists’ salon inspired by Lorca’s Generación de ’27.

Los Porteños is committed to making Latino and Latin American literature an integral part of the Portland community. We are dedicated to raising our voices and raising awareness of our diverse languages, canons, stories and cultures. We develop and nurture each unique voice into a collective of writers honoring this diverse heritage. Founded in 2006 with the steadfast support of Milagro Theatre, we have presented annual literary readings for Day of the Dead as well as participated in Milagro’s La Luna Nueva festival. In 2011, we began hosting a William Stafford Birthday Reading featuring original, multilingual poetry and prose written in response to Stafford poems.

2014 marked Los Porteños’ foray into community-building projects, including a Noche de Neruda reading at Literary Arts, a staged reading of Marrano Justice in collaboration with Congregation Ahavath Achim, and the production of Words That Burn in commemoration of Hispanic Heritage Month, the William Stafford Centennial, and the rescindment of Executive Order 9066. A dramatization of the World War II experiences of conscientious objector William Stafford, Japanese-American internee Lawson Inada, and Chicano Marine Guy Gabaldón, Words That Burn was supported by 20 community sponsors, including arts and humanities funders; Asian-American, Latino, and peace organizations; as well as universities and libraries. Recent collaborations featured Echoes Cabaret—in memory of “the disappeared”—with the Jewish Theatre Collaborative and Mujeres—in celebration of International Women’s Day—with Milagro.

Upcoming readings include Letters in Exile: William Stafford and Miguel Hernández at Literary Arts on Wednesday, May 13 at 7 pm.

If I Were a Nahua Poet

Make my body a cuicoyan, this house of song.
Garland my bones with those who have gone before, colli,
And the ones who have gone before them, colli. Return,
Return. Let the sweet wind be their breath on my shoulder,
Their tug on my tunic. Let my voice join the ancients
To swell the sky with a thousand plumes of light. Ehua!

And when the moon moves between sun and earth,
Let us remember to beat our deerskin drums and dance.
To pound our bare feet and chests until this holy earth
Splits in two, and volcanoes rise up in song. Only then
Will this life be worthy: to make the dark earth rumble,
And the heart fiercely tremble. Yolhuihuiyocaz, tremble.

By Cindy Williams Gutiérrez
From the small claim of bones, Bilingual Press, 2014.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic relocates to Angst Gallery with featured reader Nancy Flynn Thursday, February 12

January 18, 2015

Ghost Town Flyer February 12 2015

Printed Matter Vancouver and Leah Jackson Present
GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
In a new location
Downtown in the Vancouver Arts District
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington

Angst Gallery
1015 Main Street
Vancouver, WA 98660

Delicacies and libations provided by Niche Wine and Art Bar

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004

christopherjluna@gmail.com

With our Featured Reader Nancy Flynn:

Nancy Flynn

Nancy Flynn grew up on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, spent many years on a downtown creek in Ithaca, New York, and now lives near the mighty Columbia in Northeast Portland. She attended Oberlin College in the 1970s, Cornell University in the 1980s, and got her MA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton in 1994. A former university administrator, her writing has received an Oregon Literary Fellowship, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Recent poems have appeared in Gold Man Review, PANK, Posit, and Raven Chronicles; her latest chapbook is Eternity a Coal’s Throw. A complete list of her publications is available at www.nancyflynn.com.

Tide Table

Leadbetter Point, Willapa National Wildlife Refuge

beyond the edge of words a fading line
surrendered into silence syntax moved
directing where to stalk or pantomime
in semaphores the byways unimproved
beyond the edge of worlds a falling dream
that seeks to beach the tidal rising fast
past current rush through estuary sea
runs eeling too a salted push of grass
for refuge snowy plovers poised to lift
from mudflat nests gone boggy skyward hail
upended wintering down a calling cliff
beyond the edge of worth what loss unveils
inscription on the fly leaf constant no
ellipses still how much I do not know

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Eighth Anniversary Potluck January 8, 2015/ Final Reading at Cover to Cover Books before changing locations in February 2015

December 29, 2014

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Eighth Anniversary Potluck January 8, 2015

Final Reading at Cover to Cover Books before changing locations in February 2015

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington

Potluck at 6pm
Reading at 7pm

Thursday, January 8
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B
(St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

Christopher and Mel at Cover to Cover BooksGhost Town Poetry Open Mic founder Christopher Luna

and Cover to Cover Books owner Mel Sanders

Mel Sanders, who has been keeping the bookstore open late for us since 2007, recently announced that Cover to Cover Books will be closing its doors at the end of January. We are very grateful to Mel for her many years of service to the poetry community and to Northwest writers, and we will miss her and her wonderful bookstore. Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic’s success would not have been possible without her support and her patience.

Fortunately, the series has found a new home. Beginning in February, we will relocate to Angst Gallery, 1015 Main Street in downtown Vancouver, owned by another tireless champion of the arts, Leah Jackson. Contact christopherjluna@gmail.com or visit printedmattervancouver.com for more information.

Join Christopher Luna, Toni Partington, and the Vancouver poetry community as we celebrate eight years of open mic poetry at Cover to Cover Books and bid a fond farewell to our favorite bookstore with one more anniversary potluck and open mic poetry reading. Please bring a dish to share.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Airlie Press Authors Annie Lighthart and Dawn Diez Willis at Cover to Cover Books December 11, 2014

November 27, 2014

Cover to Cover Flyer December 11 2014

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.

[POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER] Celebrate a Decade of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic with Christopher Luna, Toni Partington, and Featured Reader Peggy Barnett On Saturday, November 22, 2014

October 24, 2014

Due to the severe weather warning issued for Oregon and SW Washington, Cover to Cover owner Mel Sanders has decided to close the bookstore on November 13. Therefore, we are postponing this month’s reading until Saturday, November 22 at 3pm. Please share this news with your friends and contact, and then join us on the 22nd for a celebration of our 10th Anniversary.

In November 2004, Christopher Luna founded what later came to be known as Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic. At the time there were very few poetry events in Vancouver, WA. The series began at Ice Cream Renaissance. He realized that he was filling a need in the community when the shop was packed for the first night of the reading. Today Ghost Town Poetry continues to be a community in which new and emerging writers can share their work in an environment that is fun, safe, and supportive. This month please join us in celebrating ten years of open mic poetry in Vancouver….

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted by Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
and Printed Matter Vancouver founder Toni Partington

3pm
Saturday, November 22
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

GT 2 FRONT COVERFeaturing Peggy Barnett

Peggy Barnett was born in 1945 and grew up in Queens, New York in the 1950’s. She went to Public School 89, Joseph Pulitzer JHS 145, Music and Art High School and graduated from The Cooper Union with a degree in Fine Art. She opened a photography studio in 1968 and became a very successful corporate still-life and portrait photographer. She sold the studio in 2006 and moved north of Seattle to the green fields of Maltby, Washington.

Peggy knows that the Northwest is beautiful, but memories of the past haunt her: the Holocaust, growing up Jewish in an Italian and Irish neighborhood in Queens, the atomic bomb, public school, junior high school, and childhood’s distant happenings arise in her poetry as in a dream. Her mind flits back and forth between the present and the past. The present on the West Coast is always interrupted by the past of the East Coast. Her poetic memoirs On Your Left dwell on the specifics of unending change. For more info, visit http://www.prbarnett.com

My Vagabond Song

“The scarlett of the maples can shake me like
the cry of bugles going by”
A Vagabond Song, Bliss Carmen, 1894

A Macintosh Apple doesn’t travel well
across the country.
It needs to stay home in New England

in the crisp autumn nights that
turn leaves red and gold

in the black soil full of humous
and colonial history

crisp thin skin with
tang and tartness
cut with sugary juices to the snap bite.

Last year on my birthday
Kathy sent me
in an envelope
some Macintosh seeds
from an apple she had just eaten.

The smell of woodsmoke
down Frost’s country road
thick in mudtime

past orchards getting smaller
as they are everywhere.

I want to feel it’s dark red roundness
warm in my palm
so I can put my head down
and smell it
and go home.
Peggy Barnett, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC Featuring Risa Denenberg September 11, 2014

August 21, 2014

Cover to Cover Flyer September 11 2014

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

7pm
Thursday, September 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 Risa Denenberg:

Risa Denenberg

Risa Denenberg is an aging hippie living a solitary life in Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula. She earns her keep as a nurse practitioner, having worked for many years in end-of-life care and more recently in chronic pain management. She is a moderator at The Gazebo, an online poetry board; reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing; and is an editor at Headmistress Press, dedicated to publishing lesbian poetry. She has three chapbooks, what we owe each other (The Lives You Touch Publications, http://www.thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Publications/Denenberg.html 2013); In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, http://www.thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Publications/Denenberg2.html 2014); and blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girls Press, 2014); and a full length book, Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, http://www.amazon.com/Mean-Distance-Sun-Risa-Denenberg/dp/0615839665 2013). For more info, please visit: http://risadenaday.wordpress.com/

Mean Distance cover

Metanoia Lost

I speak god language
because people die
and god is the tongue of death.

Death stopped time, left me behind
my father with the small pot of raspberry jam
he ate with a spoon.

My story-line is a birth, a tooth-
ache, a marriage, a broken wrist, a custody war,
a death by fire.

It’s no different than yours—
a flash-memory in the shower,
a bruise without details.

Life offers tautologies—there is no god
but god. Have I ever considered conversion
or even slight faith?

There was no metanoia the day
I fell from grace and lost my name on the road.
Lost is an actual place, you know.

Risa Denenberg

http://vimeo.com/92423501

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Brittany Baldwin and Leah Noble Davidson Thursday, August 14, 2014

July 11, 2014

Cover to Cover Flyer August 14 2014

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

7pm
Thursday, August 14
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

Featuring Brittany Baldwin and Leah Noble Davidson:

Brittany Baldwin lives by a creek in rural Oregon with a dog, cat and some chickens. She has cooked professionally for 20 years and written poems since she was a child. She prefers the woods to anything else.

Leah Noble Davidson head shotLeah Noble Davidson in action

Leah Noble Davidson has enthusiasm up the wahoo. Her debut book, Poetic Scientifica (published through University of Hell Press), was Powell’s 3rd bestselling small press book of last year, and she currently produces Portland’s Moth StorySLAM. If you would like to see an example of Leah reading her work, take a look at Tiffany Burba-Schramm’s video from the Independent Publishing Resource Center on March 28, 2014: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ECXlm8I-zSg&autoplay=1

Square Nails
By Brittany Baldwin

I promised I wouldn’t write about us
to myself

even as I was watching you point your finger into the
door of your truck as it idled in the drive for the last time

you were saying something about
wanting your half of the money for the house

and I was watching how square your nails were,
trying to capture the corners of your hands and thinking
of all we did for each other all those days

all of the building as these hands came together

and they would never hold the other again

there would be a passing of money

inside a bank on a gray day

and then forever

Have
By Leah Noble Davidson

The depression begins with you fingering hand towels you can’t afford in a store you’ll never remember the name of because you’re consumed with how they remind you of the ones you dried the dishes with when you quit working to stay home with the baby while he started his career at the job that you got for him so he wouldn’t have to work nights at the bookstore, pretended to be him, wrote the résumé and answered the emails. You researched how to ace an interview, picked out and ironed his clothes.

He could buy you these towels if you hadn’t left because he threw you across the kitchen floor, told you how much you owed him, but that money is for flowers now, for a woman much prettier than you, someone he’s learned to be thankful for.