Monday, June 22 at 7:30 PM

SPC at 1719 25th Street

Host: Tim Kahl

Stella Beratlis is an Instructor of English at Modesto Junior College. She co-edited an anthology of Modesto poets titled More than Soil, More than Sky, on Quercus Review Press, and her poems have appeared in Penumbra, hardpan, Song of the San Joaquin, Dirty Napkin, Quercus Review, and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. She is a regular participant in the Second Tuesday Poetry Series at the Barking Dog Restaurant, hosted by Modesto Poet Laureate Gillian Wegener.

Just do a straight hardwood cutting.
Place them into a large glass vase.
These are sticks, sticking straight up.

There’s a conflicted pleasure
in how the sap can flow in the branch,
disembodied from the shrubby heart.

Wait for the buds to open. So alive,
a sea-monkey that wakens in water,
O monstrous. O propagation.

I’ll never tire of these stems
orphaned from the root ball,
severed from the mycorrhizal web

as if nothing else mattered.
For those of us missing symbiosis
with its fungus and host plants,

we’re sad figures who stick to it,
queen bees, parthenogenitors
of our own aquariums, brine-shrimp-land—

or trapped inside of snow globes,
our handsome cuttings loud, self-mothering
as we push into tiny new spaces.

first published in The Dirty Napkin

Lisa Erin Robertson was born in Sonoma County. THE ORBIT OF KNOWN OBJECTS (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2015) is her first full-length collection of poems. She lives with her family in Northern California, where she has worked in public health for many years. In THE ORBIT OF KNOWN OBJECTS, Lisa Erin Robertson gives us long, breathless poems, some of them almost like fever dreams, tangled up in love and loss. The “known object” whose orbit she charts is family: the family of origin, lost, remembered, and finally supplanted by a new and precarious one.

Helen Wickes was raised on a horse farm in southeastern Pennsylvania and attended Vassar College. She lives in Oakland, California, has a Ph.D. in psychology, and worked for many years as a psychotherapist. In 2002, she received an M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first book of poems, In Search of Landscape was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press. Her second poetry collection, Dowser’s Apprentice, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2014, as was her third book of poems, Moon Over Zabriskie.

They walk, but it’s not quite walking—
I’d say they approach, with eagerness, not exactly

as you remember them, but somehow
better—at ease—having arrived at the essential
comfort they longed for, so unattainable
in life, and now stripped of all

that onrushing, kaleidoscopic existence, they’ve
acquired a simple presence, and as you step
closer, it’s evident they have each become
what you hoped for, as you have surely

turned into someone they envisioned,
your silliness and evasions, your rigidity included,
but as you observe in their faces
an endless calm, where once there was boredom

or rage, adoration or bemusement,
none of this matters, which is in itself a small sorrow,
that their old hunger for you
to say something funny, sit for another hour,

and feed their slavering dogs, that’s all gone now, and there
isn’t a thing you can offer them, and nothing
you can take back with you.

first appeared in Poetry Daily