Upset Press Poetry Reading on December 12th

Despite unfriendly wind and rain, a group of poets and a few of their countless followers gathered together to inhale and exhale verse in the cozy back room at Zora Art Space. It was a reunion of old and new members of our poetry group that has been meeting with varying degrees of regularity for the last seven years. Because of offspring, demanding spheres of our professions, accidental injuries, and general fluctuations in our lives, we meet with limited frequency. Nonetheless, when we reunite, we are a tempest of artistic merriment and bawdy humor, finding stimulus in each other's words.

The reading was organized by Zohra Saed who realized shortly before the reading that she had to read at a different event and was thus physically absent though we are used to her magical invisibility which serves to enhance her mystery and power (thanks Z for bringing us together!). Here is the line-up of that night: 1) Robert Booras who resurrected after not reading in public for more than 3 years; 2) Karen Pittelman who proved to be an extraordinary MC; 3) Jenny Husk who left her two kids at home in Connecticut and took several trains to get to Brooklyn; 4) me, Denise Galang, who was inspired by Jenny to read some of my breast poems; 5) Rachel Rear who read a funny, newly-composed relationship-with-poetry poem; 6) Sean O'Hanlon whose poetry resonates with irreverent reverence (and I am not just saying that because he is my babies' daddy); and 7) Nicholas Powers who was unable to attend because of an ankle injury; however, we took turns reading poetry from his book, Theater of War.

Here are the poems I read:

“The Startling Reality of Things”°

Put down the Post or Sun. Read me instead:

timeless, unrestricted by column widths,

editor’s decisions, federal dials.

I am the prisoner stripped and ravished,

my genitals helplessly stroked by invading soldiers.

I am a mother coming home from market

finding my sons and daughters buried

in the concrete ruin of my ancestral home:

aflame, guided missile blasted

into bright afternoon play room.

I am gashes left in memory

when in war’s games

children’s beds become graves.

My rage soaks the soil.

More rage sprouts.

Carry me in your shirt pocket or purse

around your neck like a talisman

and you’ll have the gift of seeing

past stiff indifferent stares on

stalled rush-hour trains,

past office dividers, computer screens,

backyard gates, country boundaries:

to find faces reconciled

by the same frustrations and fates,

our tongues broken down to breath.

Take me to your ear when walking,

sitting on a lawn chair, lying on a cot in winter.

Hear me in machines’ heartbeats:

black smoke exhaled from rusted lungs,

the heater’s rattling drum.

Take me home with you

after a night of sipping cocktails

caress and undress me

fondle my words in your mouth

consonants like teeth, vowels like water.

Marry me and we will nourish each other,

swallow every morsel of our meals,

conceive new visions:

all our ravings and rapture flickering

always waking, always waxing.

When I am part of your morning rituals,

percolate and pour, I’ll undo your sleepy strings.

Spread on toast like fresh fruit spread

I’ll sweeten the bitter residue of waking.

Clarity – I’ll brim in your breakfast room…

---

° Title of Fernando Pessoa’s poem (under heteronym Albert Caeiro)

Pomegranates in Winter

Fall

Fifty miles of speeding asphalt and deciduous trees on the I80

and I am at the Delaware Water Gap.

Standing at this break in land, I almost lose my footing on solid soil

and fall into this dammed river between states. My fate –

perhaps. The first of my lineage of restless women born of coconut palms

and orchid petals, caught in the whims of typhoons, riding the easterly winds

to America – to be buried in the bones of this bucolic nowhere.

This whirling autumn daze may be my death some day.

Although I love hearing the crick-crack of twigs beneath my feet

and catching crimson maple leaves between my hands,

I do not want to be an oak or goose or sheep in winter horizons that bear no fruit.

I am tired of driving down highways and being met with ice.

What if I freeze into these woods, crack at the hooves of a deer?

Will I forget about my thirst for buko juice?

Sonnet to Silence

Sonnets on Striking

Sonnet to Bubbles

Excerpt from Breast Series

In Between Sleep and Not

(I wrote this poem before the reading while Sean dropped the kids off at their grandparents' house on Staten Island)

Sketches of a poem hidden

among the wreckage of lost

items: brown spiral notebook,

glitter glue cap, tape dispenser,

the minutes I could have turned into verse

but instead turned into

week’s worth of minestrone soup.

I shall never get out of this!

The cycle of building and demolishing

and rebuilding the sticks

of sanity that get huffed

and puffed away by my children’s

hungry cries, students’ stories in need of resolution,

dishes and stove damning my neglect.

What happens in this loss?

My son scoots onto my lap

with a pop-up book,

daughter draws black, abstract flowers

for every member of the family,

my anger over her earlier nagging

to play on my computer dissolving…

While zygotes of poems lie hidden

between pages,

slumber in synapses,

I, like Plath, am trying to collect my strength

to connect the many pieces of me,

broken and dispersed,

relics within the wool of the rugs.