Braided Lives

"Artists from Taos, New Mexico, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and writers from across the United States come together to celebrate visual art and the spoken word in which the artist calls and the poet responds." This is the description of Braided Lives, an art exhibition and poetry reading which opens in San Francisco this Thursday at the SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, San Francisco. 16 visual artists and 15 poets will participate, and Sacramentan JoAn Osborne and ex-Sacramentan Colette Jonopulos (both of whom edit Tiger's Eye: A Journal of Poetry) will have poems posted there, and will be reading this Friday and Saturday at 7pm. Here is a poem from JoAn:


COWBOY'S METAPHOR
—for Kenneth

The girth of the mare lays wet against my skin.
The sky unreels the caws of circling crows.
A rattling marks a snake’s intended sin.
Red dirt unfurls in dusty devil-blows.
At canyon’s edge on a sultry August day,
we climb on jagged rocks and slipping sand;
the intensity grows while horses balk and neigh.

We find the strays alive on the tableland.

Today, with horses caged beneath car hoods
and fainting shades of cattle wrangling chores,
we’d swap our boots for slippers—if we could,
and drop our weighted life in these outdoors.
As evening falls it forms a dusky dome.
The climb cannot compare to coming home.

___________________________

The exhibit continues until July 28. Info: annebishop@usa.net.

Time to start thinking about Snake 7, already! Poems, poems, poems. ART! Photographs. Cartoons. Reviews. And articles. If you have ideas for articles, let me know. Next deadline is 8/15.

—Medusa