August 21, 2005

Sarah Mangold & Gale Czerski

Sunday, August 21, 2005
7:30 pm

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


Sarah Mangold received a BA in English literature from the University of Oklahoma and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her first book, Household Mechanics (New Issues, 2002) was selected by C. D. Wright for the New Issues Poetry Prize. Other books include two chapbooks, Blood Substitutes (Potes & Poets Press, 1998) and Boxer Rebellion (gong, 2004). She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Seattle Arts Commission and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. She lives in Seattle and publishes/edits Bird Dog, a journal of innovative writing and art. Recent work appears in Traverse, Colorado Review, and the Chicago Review.


Gale Czerski: the little door slid back somewhere in Ohio, 1959 (?).
For several years unable to tell the difference between time and locality.
For several years unable to sleep (cf. Keats' negative capability).
Eva, a black cat, and then Portland, a treehouse, red.


Up to nine tiny moons

More than chicken
about our situation
household tap

a container
but also the life
at a makeshift
and in the clothes

process of catastrophe
to applaud a show
rummy for money
stare at the camera

where you can say and hear
in her chosen field
a lens of their own
writer’s clothing
increasingly addled by gin

workers refuse to set in type
all the genres of paint

take a pair of scissors
in the late nineteen-forties
the benches are made

blindness the willfulness
he does not apologize
dressing to produce
quotation marks

the sensual Charlotte
open to a depth
revered and loved
leave the river
of the tiresome daily job

observations to share about her
improve my chances
claimed that he had seen
real differences between
but the exact number

Sarah Mangold


"Could it be that red is the one colour that is asking for a body?"
(I Send You this Cadmium Red: A Correspondence between John Berger and John Christie)

Red asking for a body
was bleeding everywhere as if the skin was only a permeable vessel for red
searching for a body. Red was leaving everywhere through permeable skin as if body bleeding
everywhere was a deception for skin.
We were kneading blood.
You are swimming through red and from a distant tomato you wave.

But red is more than enough room to pace in you. That is, a color that won't compromise.
In fact you have never existed outside of clay. Other colors that fail to hold red are burned skin.
Not restrained in its intention, red will never settle for peach.
Red is uncompromising in its search for an elegy dense with beets.
Though your elegy is beet, roses shedding color leave lingering accounts of your losses.
Outside of ghosts looking for a body, red is wandering through rows of tombstones, searching
for metamorphic rock.

Gale Czerski