Mary Zeppa and Ann Menebroker
with special musical guest Cynthia Speakman
Monday, April 29 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at Sacramento Poetry Center
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke
Mary Zeppa, a singer and lyricist as well as a poet and literary journalist, has been active in the Sacramento Poetry Center since 1981. She currently co-hosts SPC’s Third Thursday at the Central Library Reading series. Zeppa’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and on-line journals, including Perihelion, Switched-on Gutenberg, Zone 3, The New York Quarterly and Permafrost, and in several anthologies. She is the author of two chapbooks, Little Ship of Blessing and The Battered Bride Overture. Zeppa has been lucky enough to share the stage with the Award-Winning Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet at three SPC Jazz & Poetry Live events. For 20 years, she was 1/5 of the a cappella quintet Cherry Fizz.
They offer the widow two more second chances
The widow’s white skin snags like parchment.
Still, the widow’s impetuous arms
find the shriveled old man in the corner
slumped in his old, battered dreams.
*
The girl she was stands at her window:
a spring day, 1961. All the light there is snags
on the blossoming plum, on the red in
her hair, her white arms. She wants
all of it. Now. In the room with her.
She repents every sound-asleep hour.
–Mary Zeppa
Ann Menebroker was born in Washington D.C. but has lived in or around the Sacramento area since 1951. She began writing poetry at that time, and has never stopped. She joined the Sacramento Poetry Center about a year after it was founded. Menebroker has published books and chapbooks, been in anthologies, been a poetry editor, had her work printed on broadsides and postcards, taught poetry in the prison system, judged poetry contests, etc; and presently writes a few poems now and then. In 2010 and 2013, her poems were in a textbook anthology, Literature and Its Writers, edited by Ann and Samuel Charters. Her last small chapbook collection was published by Kamini Press in Sweden in 2011.
For Joe DiMaggio
for a long time baseball has been a boy’s
dream and spring his time to be kissed awake
because the grass smells good, is tall enough
to cut down, his mitt is oiled and fits him
like a pattern of his leanest need
something he starves for, but the regulators
for a busy life tell him the game’s too slow
the heroes are no longer on the mound, at bases
or in the field. you could build a small village
by the top of the ninth inning and extra
innings are torture. but he still believes
in the game. he still believes in the pitcher’s
magic, the hitter’s power, the catcher’s technique.
the umpire’s call. in his dream it’s the seventh
inning and the crowd knows all the words to the song.
the bat boy is so full of joy he trips over home plate.
-Ann Menebroker
Cynthia Speakman’s life is all about performing and teaching. For 8 years, she was a member of the spoken word group StoryVoices; she has been teaching children’s theatre for 12 years. Speakman has appeared in a wide range of local productions, among them The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, Harvey and (as the Queen of Hearts) Alice in Wonderland. Her most recent performances were The Diviners at California Stage and The Reunion at the Geery. She has been in several movies and you may occasionally hear her in radio commercials or see her downtown giving a Segway tour or Hysterical Walk in Old Sac. Cynthia wants to thank “the Sacramento community for being so supportive of its artists.”
