Stuart L. Canton and Richard Lopez
Mon. Jan. 26 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Stuart L. Canton is a native of the river city and a student at CSU, Sacramento. He has been published in Poetry Now, WTF!?, and Rattlesnake Review, as well as Metonym and, most recently, The American River Review. He has read many times at Luna’s Café and The Sacramento Poetry Center, but has been on a writing hiatus for some time. He has now returned and is experimenting with different poetic aesthetics/philosophies like surrealism, where his latest chapbook, “A Whimsical Corpse” by Benicio Poema, found its inception. These experiments are in hopes of finding a more authentic art that keeps him and those who share in the art “uncomfortably human.” He can be followed at facebook.com/stuartlcanton where his email and websites are listed. Benicio Poema can be reached via beniciopoema@gmail.com.
American Sentences composed during a storm
The clouds loom overhead with broad, gray fuselages about to burst.
Streaks of sunlight shine through a marbled ceiling of slate sky and black cloud.
Mi abuelita calls the crowded noise of perched sparrows, “rain chatter.”
White blossoms billow and blow away on the wind that carries the clouds.
Newspapers and pamphlets flap silently in the shadow of thunder.
Hanging chimes are instruments for the wind’s eager hands to play.
Concrete walls darken when wet, with ash shades seemingly sketched with charcoal.
Stairs change into pools swollen with rain, crumpled leaves and cigarette butts.
Snails attempt the ten yards from one side of the walkway to the other.
Shoes squelch in dark puddles of cold water that seeps into socks, wets feet.
Early darkness brings the soggy glow of street lamps to the evening.
The twisted fingers of a tree hold its last few leaves to the gray sky.
Richard Lopez has published three chapbooks, The Grapevine, Super8, and a split-chap with Jonathan Hayes, hallucinating california. he has published poems, essays, reviews, and interviews with fellow brothers and sisters in the art, in online and offline publications. Recently poems have appeared in cordite, otoliths, and moss trill. Currently Lopez is deep in a collaborative project with the Swedish poet lars palm and an interview with the German Buddhist poet Stefan Hyner. He is also engaged in a poem a day practice titled Dailies. Richard Lopez is a Sacramento native, born at Mercy Hospital at the time the late, great writer Raymond Carver was working there as a janitor. He walks to work everyday and lives with his wife and son.
dailies
while belief in the greys
is cold comfort
if we are alone
yeats
who described his belief in a vision
faeries wear boots
saw them with his own two eyes
who am i to judge
tap that vein
skate or die
