Water’s weight
raised sky
held her down
Waves beat fatigued wings
into molten scales of sun: [Read more…]
Water’s weight
raised sky
held her down
Waves beat fatigued wings
into molten scales of sun: [Read more…]
by At Large
By Mel Freilicher
An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre
by Paul Avrich
AK Press, 2018
The self-professed group of anarchists who comprise AK Press, a worker-run collective which publishes and distributes radical books, visual and audio media, has done a great service by reissuing Paul Avrich’s fascinating study of an American original. As Robert Helms suggests in his instructive Foreword outlining Avrich’s own background and achievements as the premier scholar of American anarchism until his death in 2006, this author “succeeded in rescuing this brilliant and compelling person from near non-existence.” [Read more…]
by Rich Kacmar
R.I.P. Ntozake Shange, (October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018). StarTribune writer Rohan Preston notes that Shange’s “For Colored Girls”—an empowering series of interwoven poems on love and loss, joy and pain—introduced choreopoem into the dictionary. The poems were gathered into a show that opened off-Broadway in 1975, and on Broadway in 1976, and has been produced consistently ever since. Shange, 70, had suffered multiple strokes in recent years, but she had been on the mend lately, creating new work, giving readings and being feted for her work. She died in her sleep Saturday morning in an assisted living facility in Bowie, Md., where she lived. [Read more…]
Behind the door god’s
ninety-nine paths
Initiates
voluntarily shed coats
remove shoes
submit their inner selves
to the scrutiny of electromagnetic waves
The absolved
float down narrow corridors
through automatic doors [Read more…]
by Jim Miller
San Diego City Works Press is a project of the San Diego Writers Collective, which is a group of San Diego writers, poets, artists, and patrons dedicated to the publication and promotion of the work of San Diego area artists of all sorts. Our specific interests include local, ethnic, and border writing as well as formal innovation and progressive politics.
The Collective’s main focus is local, but we have engaged in occasional collaborations with writers from around the world. City Works Press is an all-volunteer non-profit, funded by local writers and friends of the arts, committed to the publication of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and art by members of the San Diego City College community and beyond.
Sunday, October 21, at 4:30 at Tiger!Tiger! City Works Press, in concert with Verbatim Books, is proud to present the release reading for local novelist Josh Turner and San Diego poet, Joe Medina. Fall 2018 marks 13 years of publication by SD City Works Press, and Baxt and Medina’s works continue our tradition of birthing first books by homegrown authors. [Read more…]
The joke is
on US
when laughter
provokes tears
Good medicine
goes bad
Delivery
executed
with the slap of a stick
that punches
our original voices
into mimes [Read more…]
I still feel my fathers hands
on top of mine
guiding the push reel mower
over lawn
the satisfaction of sweat
put into each cleanly cut line [Read more…]
When F-16s
fly overhead
I sense the bulging wall
of a blood vessel
and worry the unchecked aneurysm
will rupture
into an airburst
vaporizing
sunbathing
torsos [Read more…]
His swing was long
before he teed off
The ball spun
into an unplayable lie
prior to the drive
The game lost
because of the player’s poorly executed pre-shot routine [Read more…]
Stonewall Jackson’s
amputated arm
clawed itself
out of the grave it was given
after succumbing
to friendly fire
When the rebel General
fell ill from pneumonia,
he summoned the limb
that never refused an order
—be it to shoot
bootless deserters
or exchange money
for slaves— [Read more…]
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Code is Poetry