Peaches and Bats is a handmade magazine of poetry and adventure edited by Sam Lohmann in Portland, and appears about twice a year. To celebrate the appearance of the magazine's ninth issue, Spare Room and Mother Foucault's Bookshop are joining forces to host a reading by three local contributors to the issue. "The Firm & Aerie" will provide editorial interrompules.

Chris Ashby is a writer and musician. Having performed as Galveston for years in the Portland area, he released a self-titled EP and is in the process of releasing a full-length, Settle Down. His writing has appeared in self-publications, chapbook collaborations with visual artists (most frequently, Nate Orton's My Day series), and in James Yeary's c_L Newsletter. He splits his time between the M.A. in English program at Portland State University and as a forestry technician with the Mt. Hood National Forest. 

Maryrose Larkin's The Identification of Ghosts is forthcoming from Chax Press. She is a member of the Spare Room Collective, as well as a co-editor of Flash+Card press. Maryrose is interested in moving through the procedural into the unknowable. 

James Yeary is a poet and like-minded artist living in Portland, Oregon. He has organized various events for the Spare Room collective reading series, and has recently had a chapbook, W, published by Inkhorn press, and some epistolary essays published in Swap/Concessions.

from After Language

I.

what I would like, he 

said, is

to change your mind

there is no promise in

language what's 

left is what's left

to reduce every time 

I reread I

get something new can 

the same be said 

of (talking)

II.

the line up which we 

walk, the yellow, blue

brown bark of the ponderosa

the stones in the creek 

how do you 

say 

                         "the water is running"

the line is not a metaphor the poem is 

the trail in Southern

Oregon outside 

Grants Pass

from The Identification of Ghosts

trust in touch & hazard in situation

the score in which the I structure

the word is it understood as a whole

moral panic is

a method of being awake

but most  use the sleeping  variation 

 

If music is measured in its distance from my computer

The arrows unfold over a generation

& we all bow

Grey heart of pine, what good is your poetry

All become twin tone & born of two inks

bleed into ideas

Early birds crowing for bread

Steal from the next line

& blur in the fort

Like whisky & honey do

I traipse over to Varg without cleave

objects or kind

As a pine frame rounds a portrait

& all is collaged but the groyne

Each answer an animal, great poems unmet

I answer without a hood

As you are ushered into the wool

The striations that cleave & yet

Respond as themselves

As a crooked eye in the face of a letter