Patricia Killelea and Taylor Graham
Monday, July 22 at 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center1719 25th Street
Host: Penny Kline
Patricia Killelea is the author of Counterglow (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019) and Other Suns (Swan Scythe Press, 2011). She is Poetry Editor at Passages North and her work appears in cream city review, Quarterly Review, Barzakh, Waxwing, As/Us, The Common, and Spiritus. She also produces digital poetry films, which have been featured at Moving Poems, Poetry Film Live, screened and shortlisted for the Ó’Bhéal International Poetry Film Competition, and long-listed for the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Prize. Patricia Killelea is an Assistant Professor of English at Northern Michigan University.
Honest Light
We’re leaden with ghosts,
with doors that won’t stay shut.
We never knew how many bodies
would come and go,
mostly go;
How many times we’d have to stand
in sharpest rain,
digested without voice.
No days enter without knives;
no faces exit without trace.
Beside and among me, they
reside—the fadedones,
the former loves.
Even honest light
fails.
from Quarterly West
Taylor Graham has been a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler since 1975, responding to hundreds of missions. She and her husband, Hatch, moved to El Dorado County in 1984. She became the county’s first poet laureate (2016-18), and she remains active in the local poetry community. Her poems appear widely in print and online, including The Iowa Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University/Heyday Books). Her latest book is Windows of Time and Place, newly released by Cold River Press.
Boots Off the Trail
for the Bell Tower girls, search of summer 1984
My boots bore me summer-long searching
up Iron Mountain and down North-South
Road. I stopped at turn-outs and logging decks,
let my dog out of the car to check old fire pits,
hiked the dust of rutted skid trails. No sign
of you. I didn’t find you at Stonebreaker
Creek where foxglove and columbine nod
their secrets of green in the shade of running
water. You weren’t among the boulders
at Capps Crossing, or down Dogtown Creek.
No trace of you at Henrys Diggins, or the trail
to Blue Gouge Mine. My dog showed me
stubbed-out cigarette butts and rusting cans.
In June above Fleming Meadow, I felt a shiver
of breeze like ghost-breath, as if you might
have passed there. My boots never asked
where we were going. They just put one foot
in front of the other as my dog and I
checked off blanks of stillness on the map.
(from Windows of Time and Place; first appeared on Medusa’s Kitchen)
