7:00 pm

 

1223 NE ML King Blvd.

503-388-7665

 

$5 suggested donation; no one turned away

 

Jennifer Denrow is the author of California. She lives in Oregon. 

 

Rodney Koeneke's latest book of poems, Body & Glass, is just out from Wave Books. Other books include Etruria (Wave, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). His work has appeared in Fence, Granta, Harper's, The Nation, Poetry, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR.

 

 

Above everyone there are three planes they can't see. One is a plane of roots. One is a plane of temples. One is a plane of countries.

 

***

 

I stand like a recording of space, trying to hold what is here as an opening to what's not. The wind expands over the water. Lines in the air expand into planets. Compression and release. The tall grasses crashing away. The water makes the same five leaps to hold the shore. The only people left are waves.

 

***

 

Beneath the condition of singularity, the boundary vanishes and the singularity of affect, to which we apply distinct features, like presence, also vanishes.

 

 

 

         passerine

 

What is there in that other 

world is there as flat black 

silhouettes of great-spanned

birds on breezeway glass so 

passerines, thick protestants 

ferocious in their inwardness

don't drowse a beat before the 

god glass they can't see strikes 

down in Darwin's wonted curve 

but swerve, survive in debt to 

simple human threat--hope's 

negative, a love reversed--till 

night arrive to deepen light

depth dies to suffer sight.