Monday, December 03, 2007

Lorna Dee Cervantes Performing at Sacramento Poetry Center Tonight, 7:30

LORNA DEE CERVANTES & ALFRED ARTEAGA

WILL READ THEIR POETRY

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3 7:30 PM

AS PART OF THE SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER’S WEEKLY SERIES OF READINGS
AT THE SPACE THEATER 2509 R STREET SACRAMENTO



LORNA DEE CERVANTES has authored three books of poetry, two of them award-winning books-- Emplumada, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, and Drive: The First Quartet. Her poetry has appeared in 200 highly-recognized anthologies and too-numerous-to-count e-zines and magazines. She has performed her poetry twice at the Library of Congress, & also presented at the Walker Arts Center, The Dodge Poetry Festival, New York YMCA, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Vassar, Wellesley, and numerous other venues, university & college campuses in the US, Mexico, Spain & Colombia.



Freeway 280



Las casitas near the gray cannery,

nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses

and man-high red geraniums

are gone now.The freeway conceals it

all beneath a raised scar.

But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes,

in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout,

wild mustard remembers, old gardens

come back stronger than they were,

trees have been left standing in their yards.

Albaricoqueros, cerezos, nogales . . .

Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens.

Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena . . .

I scramble over the wire fence

that would have kept me out.

Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes

to take me to a place without sun,

without the smell of tomatoes burning

on swing shift in the greasy summer air.

Maybe it's here

en los campos extraños de esta ciudad

where I'll find it, that part of me

mown under

like a corpse

or a loose seed.

--Lorna Dee Cervantes



ALFRED ARTEAGA, born in East Los Angeles, is author of several books of poetry, creative non fiction, and cultural studies. His latest book of poems is Frozen Accident (Tia Chucha, 2006). He had been a National Endowment for the Arts and a Rockefeller Fellow. He teaches poetry in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.



Rust, Soft Metal, Cynosure



against night

those beacons being nothing

other ignite eye, flay stratum lucidum

to futile char, at some remove

of heat and kilometer

burn iconic

Behold the night point fire spit, no it is human, in the first instance an English woman knowing men in hoods takes penis for phallus for what else could she? You too and I examine this scene till it pixelates. Yet for three to wonder, there must have been one to have been there live, to have witnessed muffled cries by fabric restrained

Epidermal particulate

and smoke fabricate night

at mid day garrote

all but panic

perhaps the prey

will not arouse

this time from sleep,

and we, not by fire

yet how light beams iconic

split the black eve

crack through smoke at noon

and rouse from dreams

of bodies whole, it so bright

burns even an allure

minimum for

us excites that singular

desire for men’s heads

in bags, for mute

suffocation



The scheme is taken for a natural law whose alphabet is simple: pyrotechny and mine contain all the bits for a praxis of seizure and annihilation. Each string bares desire, confirms the black hole that sucks at everything. Even light. A pure light and a fabric of fear, a pure fear and a fabric that blinds. All is contained in the sequence of brilliant sight, luminous desire, lucent possession, that is, from night fire beacons to sirens of war to feral excitement. Intense heat and flame indistinguishable unleash a light that recalls the caterpillars to desert

-- Alfred Arteaga

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