CPITS poetry readings at Barnes & Noble, in Fremont

Apr 20 at 6:30 pm
Parkmont Elementary
Poetry Reading

Join us for a wonderful evening of poetry reading by 3rd Graders from Parkmont Elementary.  Tonight will also celebrate the release of an anthology of the students poetry by the California  Poets In The Schools.

Wednesday, Apr 28 at 7:30 pm
Reading: Poet-Teacher 

Reading & Announcement of Contest Winners

The following local poets and authors from California Poets In The Schools: Maureen Hurley, Tobey Kaplan, Lindsay Knisely, Tureeda Mikell, Kristin Palm, Mara Sheade, and John Oliver Simon will be reading from their works. We will also be announcing the winners from our Adult Poetry Contest and listening to a reading of the winning poetry.

The tipsy imperial concubine, freewrite

Shiva says it’s a peony, or maybe a rose… Must be from the same strain as Mrs. Slattery, or whatever the rose is called—the one where the wife ran off with a chauffeur? The idea being that there’s more to roses than meets the eye. All that infidelity. All those voluminous skirts and petticoats thrust skyward, full blown blooms on their backs, as it were, and her living in a brothel, says Shiva. Who is she referring to? Mrs. Slattery? Or the imperial concubine? She has to wear earplugs at night, and even the slatternly cat is cutting around, it seems. Is that why they love to step up and smelling the roses? It’s all a bit of Nirvana on the side. The cat has her nose up the arse of the imperial concubine, sniffing with mouth half open, glazed eyes at half mast. Who says they don’t have a sense of smell or a sense of aesthetics? Any old rose won’t do. Something exotic to get tipsy over, the cat knows the finer things in life… A rose is not just a rose, when concubines are involved, or chauffeurs for that matter. I always thought the magnolia blooms were like large white knickers voluminous as Mary Bianchi‘s vast acreage. On Monday mornings, we’d see them hanging out on the line in the orchard, like large white flags. It was a good thing they weren’t red, or they would be capes to play toreador. Each spring, she’d let the calves out to mow down the weeds, Holstein heifers as black and white white as your knickers, and the wind blowing in. They’d gaze at us vacuously with their soft, brown eyes. They were concubines in training, thigh deep in all that lush green grass, imperially lowering their heads with a shake, tipsy amidst all that green—these captive ladies munched amid a flurry of petals. Heifers with their tight packed little udders, not yet ready to serve the emperor of ice cream.

4/23/2004 Writers’ Group

A lone, sheep, thinking, she’d have to clear the hillside all by herself, freewrite

They put her out to pasture and forgot all about her. Tall grass towering over her shoulder. And when the rains came, she was like a huge sponge, staggering up to the fenceline looking for her lost kin. She was suffering from an identity crisis, with a none of her own nearby to comfort her. Not even a bleat. She gazed forlornly at nothing in particular. She had a job, she was on loan, they expected her to clear the hillside all by herself, a lone, sheep. Clearly they don’t know about spring bloat, my great-grandfather had to plunge an ice pick into their guts to let the gasses out when they overate. She got down to the business at hand, thoroughly cropping the tender grasses down to the roots, not knowing this is why cattle ranchers hated the arrival of her kind, her ancestors triggering range wars. She had no upper teeth and could crop the grasses right down to the roots on the fragile prairies. Erosion soon followed. The native grasses were unable to withstand such close scrutiny. There is so little left of our native grasses and plants, gardens pruned and tended with exotic imports. Like the sheep and the cow, there are is a little room for native species. Yet we don’t have a shortage of deer. And we continue to plant houses like flocks of abandoned sheep, cropping down the grasses so that the foreign British lawns may grow. The sheep doesn’t care whether it’s a fine lawn or a rough pasture. She industriously nibbles, shaking clods of dirt from the roots, edging her way up the hillside with her eye ever on the horizon. Desperate for kindred creatures, and she sidles up to two llamas haughtily looking down their long noses at her as if she were beneath contempt. Maybe she should consider another career, perhaps writing. I think I shall call her Flannelly O’Connor.

 4/22/2004 Writers‘ Group