Stan Zumbiel, Troy Myers, and Albert Garcia
Monday, April 25 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Stan Zumbiel taught English in middle and high school for thirty-five years and has had a hand in raising four children. He sat on the board of the Sacramento Poetry Center for twenty-five years. In 2008 he received his MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Previously his poems have appeared in Poet News, Nimrod, The Suisun Valley Review, Primal Urge, Convergence, Word Soup, Late Peaches, Sacramento Voices, and Medusa’s Kitchen.
Voice Unbound
From behind a folding screen – black
slashes of birds outlined in red –
she sings. Her voice comes,
as from nowhere, words solid
in flight. We can’t see her eyes,
can’t see how she sits – legs
slightly crossed, back to the screen,
each detail etched in vacancy
away from the light.
A flute begins to play
sliding from octave to octave
searching for invisible sound –
a thread winding its way
between notes, binding the notes
together, binding the voice to the
background, binding the voice
to black slashes of birds. Every night
she sings behind the screen,
not waiting for darkness
as birds take
to the woven paper air.
Troy Myers has taught English at Sacramento City College since 1999. He serves as the college Academic Senate President and is also a regional governor for the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, an advocacy organization that works solely for community college faculty and students. He currently lives in Sacramento and returned to writing poetry in mid-life.
As part of that return, Troy completed his MFA in Poetry at Stonecoast in Maine last summer. This allowed him to visit Ireland twice where he worked with Stonecoast faculty Ted Deppe and Rick Bass. He also met (and partied with) Irish poets Kate Newman, Joan Newman, and Paula Meehan.
Creeks
Walk in and feel the stones,
round and slimed with moss,
in the arches of your feet. Feel the warm
water of the shallows, tadpoles darting off
fingerling bluegill
easing into shadows. You’re six. Your mother
brought you to this summer creek
to swim, to learn the pleasure
of getting cool in the sultry heat
of this valley. How could you see
across the levee, on the other side
of the world, men slogged up another creek
in a place called the Mekong Delta,
packs slung over their backs, rifles
raised above their helmets? How could you know
why they were there
or if they knew? You’d learn later
many never made it
and many returned haunted
by the water. Here you were, a kid
whose skinny legs poked down
like an egret’s, caught up in a world of water striders,
those creatures that stay afloat
by surface tension,
and the pollywogs using their wide tails
and undeveloped legs
to push their fleshy bodies to safety.
