June 8, 2014

Rob Schlegel & Rodney Koeneke


Reading & Book Launch

Sunday, June 8
6:00 pm

please note earlier starting time

Glyph Café and Art Space
804 NW Couch (North Park Blocks)
503-719-5481

$5 suggested donation

Rob Schlegel's second book, January Machine, is just out from Four Way Books. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, and The Volta. With Daniel Poppick, he co-edits The Catenary Press. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has lived most recently in Iowa, Montana, and Washington.

Rodney Koeneke is author of the poetry collections Etruria (Wave), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX), and Rouge State (Pavement Saw), with a new chapbook forthcoming from Hooke Press this fall. An early member of the Flarf Collective, he was involved with Poets Theater and Neo-Benshi events in the Bay Area until moving to Portland in 2006, where he currently lives, writes, and teaches British and World History at Portland State University.


from JANUARY MACHINE

In the city's narrow streets
I pose on my bike as the good doctor
offering jokes to sisters
losing brothers in screens. I pose
as every passing trend,
as meaning living a longer
life in words. I pose as a harlequin
led through the night on a leash by a girl
singing I Am Come America.
I model my death after the dog's.
I pose in photographs, till everything
I've been and everything I'll ever be
is the faceless man standing in the warm
sea, holding up a late Rothko.

   Rob Schlegel



sharon mesmer

Sharon get up
be cinema again
for long pearly stretches the sky isn't anything
but stars
inside the theaters
projectors push light through emulsions
soon we'll be peasants
films digitally perfect
sugars beat by threshers from the cane
with alarming new efficiency
mixed in low-calorie sodas
and presented to you at your table
as if it were 16, blond you
behind the stockyards
enduring the matinee of being Polish
eyes & a moon & silence
rivers outside the theaters
filling with evening's cerise
there isn't a syntax
to carry this light
light isn't syntax
it just holds everything.

   Rodney Koeneke