Monday 6/30/14 Features Adele Mendelson

6/30/14 Adele Mendelson

Adele Mendelson had a long career as an ESL teacher at the University of California at Berkeley. She began writing poetry by accident and then devoted herself to it for many years.  Now she is mostly writing fiction, but the poems keep coming anyway, for which she is thankful.   She has produced several volumes of work and enjoys sharing her writing at venues around the Bay Area. She believes that writing should be sexy, there should be something at stake, and the dark side should be lurking just beneath the cover.

Monday, June 23rd, is Fun Night

6/23/14 Theme Night Other People’s Poems – bring a poem (or 2) on paper without your name, someone else will read it and we will attempt to guess authorship.

Sally Elesby featured 6/16

6/16/14 Sally Elesby featrured

Sally Elesby is a writer and artist who lives in Oakland. Her poetry has been published in OccuPoetry, and will appear in future issues of The Main Street Rag and The Lyric. Elesby comes out of a visual arts background. Her paintings were featured in solo exhibitions at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Karen Golden Fine Art in New York. Elesby taught painting at California College of the Arts until her retirement in 2012.

INFRASTRUCTURE                                                                                 Sally Elesby 2011

That pothole

under the bridge that's

being retrofitted behind

concrete Jersey barriers tagged

with black graffiti and

an eight foot construction wall painted

baby blue, which

redirects traffic into

one lane so dump trucks can

come and go except

during rush hours when

gridlock quickly

frustrates commuters whose

tires chew into asphalt with

stops and start-ups day

after day--two times a day--for

almost one year,

has doubled in size.

6/9/14 Jess Bouchard featured

6/9/14 Jessie Bouchard

J.R. Bouchard grew up in upstate New York, but has since relocated all over the U.S. for school, teaching, and love. She received her MFA from Rosemont in Bryn Mawr, PA and has been teaching middle school and college English the last several years. She currently works for America SCORES, a non-profit centered around teaching youth poetry and soccer-- quite the combo, we know! Her poetry can be found in WordRiot, Foundling Review, Melee Live, Camroc Press Review, and others. When she's not writing, she's probably baking a babka or watching cat videos.

A glimpse

He is quietly curled on one
hip, one elbow. A man curled in half,
Twenty-eight. I rub his bottom
leaving all of my touch, soothing his near-sleep.
I didn’t know him then, but grin at his imagined
baby body, still rubbing. As his mother set him afloat
her river to mine, like Moses never orphaned.
Her first son. My first of all firsts. I accept
him over and over. Let the river pour over
my head, let it take over me—
               let me drown in this moment.