Alicia Cohen & Kreg Hasegawa

Sunday, February 13, 2005
7:30 pm

New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny Street
$5 suggested donation.

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Kreg Hasegawa lives in Seattle. Coeditor of Monkey Puzzle (an 8.5 x 11” stapled magazine), he hosts the Projects Reading Series at the 1506 Projects art gallery on Capitol Hill. This year he will also start publishing chapbooks. His essays have appeared in The Stranger, American Book Review, and elsewhere, and stories have appeared in Meredith Quartermain's The News and Larry Fagin's Sal Mimeo.

Alicia Cohen lives in Portland, Oregon, where, in 2000, she helped establish the art space/collective Pacific Switchboard. Her book of poems, bEAR, was published by Handwritten Press, and last year she wrote, directed, and produced a multimedia opera and gallery installation titled "Northwest Inhabitation Log." Her work has recently appeared in Ecopoetics, How2, Bird Dog, and Traverse. She is the poetry editor for the Organ Review of Arts.

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So You Have Trouble with Statements

So you have trouble with statements or, more precisely, speech itself. It keeps on happening. All that seems real anymore are the things you have suddenly left. You never know how much you belong until you are asked to leave. Leaving took the most time, a dissolve so slow you never realized you were gone. In the mountains you are wicked and strong. The snow accumulates around you. The cabin emits a welcoming belch of black smoke. Now you are back in the city. People are in need of money, need more than you have. So you pass them by. Trick is to leave it up a sleeve. "I don't believe," said Daniel to the telemarketer, "in communication." Then Chris, quite simply, constructed a door to keep the cold out.

Kreg Hasegawa

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The Other Lights
 to L. S.


under the heavy stones of the path there is no light

the green leaves of grass on the lawns
across Oakland during a draught

as the sun circles above
under the stones bare and flat hands
lifted
what's wet and black
black and live
not

the sorrowful

the sorrowful

poetry

seen as a lighthouse
shining to those at sea
synthetic
"undead"


if poetry is
it almost
seems

lit like

lights
at sea calling in a sibling voice
what

Pip got
lost in

that book

in print
floating sitting upon wooden shelves

Pip in the sea
but not lost
for waiting in water
and what happened

to "him" as with wings

to anyone

the shedding of light on the subject

for what evacuates sense
as a rope thrown out to save
someone who was one
drowning

emergency
many below
emergent

Alicia Cohen