This offering is for all those love-poets who still believe in love, in all of its many-faceted forms. Read More >

Fourteen

Under the plum tree I gorged on pomegranate seeds that stained my lips. Read More >

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky is a poetry collection in two acts about what can happen to a community when the military moves in to control them. It is a tale of how the ethics of those who love, desire, or harmlessly gossip, can be transformed into actors who rape, torture, and engage in murder. Read More >

The Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium Presents:

Maria Garcia Teutsch
&
Danusha Laméris

Sunday, September 13, 2:00 p.m. via Zoom

Email jfellguth@sbcglobal.net by Sat. September 12 to receive a logon link

Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She is the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her second book is Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series). She teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.

Maria Garcia Teutsch is a poet, editor, educator and performance artist. She has published over 25 book/journals of poetry as editor-in-chief of the Homestead Review, published by Hartnell College in Salinas, and Ping-Pong journal of art and literature, published by the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Hartnell College as a member of their faculty. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ping-Pong Free Press, and publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Poet Republik Ltd. Her collection, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, won the Minerva Rising chapbook competition, judge: Heather McHugh. www.marialoveswords.com

Upcoming Reading: October 11 – Ken Weisner and Nils Peterson

For more information, please contact John Laue: (831) 684-0854

Sponsored by The Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium

READ

skiers

miss the

snow &

scientists Read More >

another’s dream

Read More >

Gemini’s ginned up as if for war—

all that’s missing is a bullet and a poet:
O America give back Jack Spicer!

She pulls her ponytail higher—
give back the unruptured discs of her back,
give back Jack’s liver, and deliver her

from this tired romanticism!
She’ll fight you all with one fist
and a black wolf. She’ll fight you

all in this melancholia of night.
She’ll correct your grammar. She’ll write
words even she can’t pronounce,

soak black cherries in gin,
feverish arm herself with armfuls
of airplanes and soldiers—again,

O Jack, where are you again
tonight?—she’ll soldier into the bright
October sky.

Jennifer Minniti- Shippey is the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary journal, Director of Poetic Youth programs, and a professor at San Diego State University. She is the author of Done Dating DJs, winner of the 2009 Fool for Poetry Chapbook competition, presented by the Munster Literature Centre; Earth’s Horses & Boys, from Finishing Line Press; and After the Tour, from Calypso Editions. Her writing has appeared in Salamander, Spillway, Cider Press Review, Tar River Poetry, and others. Keep up with her news at jennyminnitishippey.com

A Wall in Philadelphia

Yellow stenciled
digits slashed
red with spray
paint, an asemic
text November
sun comprehends
as the limit of
its reach. Deep
green weeds
glow in the rift
where asphalt
meets wall—
arched leaves
wide as any
tire in the lot
drip light, but
the lines lead
the eye:
white oval
remnant
of a name
beneath
a square
cement patch.
The poem, all
that wants
to be said,
is said—there. Read More >

COMEDY

We were still drifting as the day broke
improvising lines, like we practiced
machines in their tracks, mud
turned to cement, the feet
missed our gardens we
were coming and going
like it will matter, currents
through white sheep completely
alive, this was during the day—

it should be the truth. Naturally
in those lines this is a lie—

Uncertain—it heard us
never asking, how do you talk, even find
the words, from all the words
in your head, such a moment, liquid
of the ears, the blues
of the planet, two spoonfuls
absorb, in each head, a spiked drink, tongue
know the dropper, seem
surprised to drown the point.

Jared Schickling is the author of Needles of Itching Feathers, recently published with The Operating System. He has written several BlazeVOX books, including The Mercury Poem (2017) and Province of Numb Errs (2016), as well as The Paranoid Reader: Essays, 2006-2012 (Furniture Press, 2014); Prospectus for a Stage (LRL Textile Series, 2014); Donald Trump and the Pocket Oracle (Moria Books, 2017); and Donald Trump in North Korea (2017).  He edited A Lyrebird: Selected Poems of Michael Farrell (BlazeVOX, 2017) and he edits Delete Press and The Mute Canary, publishers of poetry. He lives in Lockport, NY.

Low Rent

I grew up in a house
built as budget permitted,
one room at a time,
chicken wire poking
through crude plaster,
walls out of plumb. Read More >