7:30 pm

1223 NE ML King Blvd.

503-388-7665

$5 suggested donation; no one turned away

Bradley Ray King was born to a farming Christian family in Altus, Oklahoma. Since obtaining graduate degrees at the University of Texas, he has taught writing, journaling, and literature to middle school through college students. His chapbook Slow Leaves is just out from Abandon Press.

Rose Swartz is a poet, photographer, and union carpenter. Originally from Michigan, she has been calling a renovated garden shed in Portland home for the past few years. Her latest collection of poems is a chapbook from Abandon Press entitled Panhandle.

Ally Harris runs the Submission Reading Series in Portland, Oregon, in which readers are selected by blind online submission. She has poems in The Maine Review, Denver Quarterly, TYPO, Bennington Review, and more.

Abandon Press (est. 2008) publishes short-run letterpress editions of literature. Located in a barn outside Nehalem, Oregon, the print shop operates by way of dumb luck, cheap beer, meticulous finagling, and pacts with spiders. Dead mice were recently discovered in a case of the dullest fonts (think Cheltenham, Arial, Comic Sans).

We said something

into an arrangement

   

It builds to what

I can't hear

any way out of

that you might offer

                or want

So let's talk more

about space

Let's try separate

breakfasts, bus routes,

          intentions, injuries,

                       et cetera

Let's talk about bed

and where to lay

and with it

some space

              for rest

"Or let's just not say anything,"

               adds a persistence

to make good

with saying

which paves me

                             in roads

Alone on the bridge with huge bruises on my legs

strips of sod flap on the slanted horizon

fields flung aside, kaleidoscopic. I jump

in the river and it flies through my esophagus

my body downs silt, coughs clouds.

A living thing: that river. The shadow

which is with me does not belong to me.

In the current is the sound of another. Shouting

low over the orchards, laughter still gathers

in the lungs' sloppy deltas, wicked creeks.

Bloodstop the sky lest the sun get out,

Wild One, hear the trees snap, come running.

Great Plains, river gone, the church walls whistle.

I stand still and watch the tornado come in.

I set some of the daydream down.

Dry light resides in dirt

damp dark gives way to stars.