Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Indigo on Thursday

Indigo Moor will be featured at Luna's (1414 16th St., Sac, 8pm) this Thursday. Here's a sample:


NOMADS
—Indigo Moor

For six days we purify metal,
Vulcan's children, sleepwalking
through sulfur clouds. A few pennies
forged for every muscled clang
of pig iron and rust. Friday’s whistle,
our Pavlovian call to bedlam,
triggers us down to dogs.

Loose drunk all Saturday, we hang
our checks on new shoes, silk ties,
and gold chains. Scrub iron ore
from our fingers, coke dust from faces
before slow fading from day to night.

A bottle of gin passes between us
as we stiff leg and hip drop a pimp
down the boulevard. We tug our hats
down until our faces are curved horizons
with brown, felt suns rising askew.

Somewhere in this city
there is music worth killing for:
manna soaked in bourbon
grilled over hot Mississippi coals.

The Easy Lion Jazz Joint
leans toward us and winks.

The intoxicating vibration
of wood-stomp and tremor-slide.
A quartet of horns, a string bass,
and skins jerks us into dance—
freezes us into stained glass hunger.

This is our siren song:
Bass so cold it shatters hot breath.
The sax man's vibrato wrenches
fevered moans from our bodies.
Sways us into cattails wrapped
in silk and sweat. Given the chance,
spit-shined leather begins to fly.

Two more juke joints before sunrise.
A plate of ribs and a whiskey sour.
Sunday morning is a hangover
hard as an I-beam laid into our heads.
All too soon, the factory whistle.

___________________________

Thanks, Indigo! Indigo has returned to us from many poetry adventures/readings/awards in New England and elsewhere.

In other adventures: Former Sacramentan Be Davison Herrera writes: Jack and I did a COMET&STAR (poetry and flute, clarinet) at a Voices of War event feature at Oregon State University and hosted a performance event for the [Sacramento poets] StraightOut Scribes ( Staajabu and V.S. Chochezi) as one stop on their 2005 USA Tour at the local Borders Books in Corvallis, with 45 attendees. We were part of the "4th Sunday at 4" music series at the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan here in Corvallis. We did a quickie at the River Gallery "Women Go Wild" events in Independence, Oregon, and I came in fifth at the DaVinci Days Festival poetry slam reading—an homage to Johnny Cash!

Good to see that Be is staying active after her move to Corvallis!

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry and announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets.