Gail Entrekin, Nevada City
FEAR
—Gail Entrekin
Fear tastes like pennies, sounds like
that shush when you clasp your hands
over your ears, floats below the surface of the pool
where there are voices on TV, birds, cars arriving,
but you can’t make any of it out.
The brain’s red alert shuts out all interference;
they could be behind your back now
revoking your right to speak, poisoning your water,
torturing your neighbor, and it would come to you
as a faint annoyance because the thing,
the thing that might happen, has sucked
all the air from the room and you are
focusing the high beam of your mind
on survival.
from fear, and if you need a doctor but you can’t pay
there is panic, also a separate thing. They know
fear is the thing you can’t see,
and they use it,
the thing waiting
around the next bend in the road,
when the brain’s messages are
stacking up behind each other,
running into each other like cars
in a freeway pile-up, and they keep you
on Yellow Alert so you’ll focus,
ignore the man behind the curtain,
the one manipulating the life of your son
with strings and mirrors. What is it?
What should we watch for?
It might be a terrorist bomb
ticking in a shoe,
an unusually hot autumn,
the disappearance of frogs.
It might be nothing
at all.
______________________
Thanks, Gail! Gail Entrekin is poetry editor of Hip Pocket Press and editor of the Women's Writing Salon web site at www.nevadacountyartscouncil.org/. She is the organizer, as well, of the Women's Writing Salon seasonal live Salons at Jason's in Grass Valley. She teaches creative writing at Sierra College in Grass Valley and lives partly in Nevada City, partly in Berkeley, with her husband, writer Charles Entrekin. Check out her website at www.entrekin.net/.
—Gail Entrekin
Fear tastes like pennies, sounds like
that shush when you clasp your hands
over your ears, floats below the surface of the pool
where there are voices on TV, birds, cars arriving,
but you can’t make any of it out.
The brain’s red alert shuts out all interference;
they could be behind your back now
revoking your right to speak, poisoning your water,
torturing your neighbor, and it would come to you
as a faint annoyance because the thing,
the thing that might happen, has sucked
all the air from the room and you are
focusing the high beam of your mind
on survival.
If you fall into snakes
in the dark there is horror, which is separatefrom fear, and if you need a doctor but you can’t pay
there is panic, also a separate thing. They know
fear is the thing you can’t see,
and they use it,
the thing waiting
around the next bend in the road,
when the brain’s messages are
stacking up behind each other,
running into each other like cars
in a freeway pile-up, and they keep you
on Yellow Alert so you’ll focus,
ignore the man behind the curtain,
the one manipulating the life of your son
with strings and mirrors. What is it?
What should we watch for?
It might be a terrorist bomb
ticking in a shoe,
an unusually hot autumn,
the disappearance of frogs.
It might be nothing
at all.
______________________
Thanks, Gail! Gail Entrekin is poetry editor of Hip Pocket Press and editor of the Women's Writing Salon web site at www.nevadacountyartscouncil.org/. She is the organizer, as well, of the Women's Writing Salon seasonal live Salons at Jason's in Grass Valley. She teaches creative writing at Sierra College in Grass Valley and lives partly in Nevada City, partly in Berkeley, with her husband, writer Charles Entrekin. Check out her website at www.entrekin.net/.
______________________
Watershed 8/18
Saturday, August 18 is the date of the 12th annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, to be held from Noon to 4 PM at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, Berkeley. Since 1996, thousands have gathered together with environmental and literary groups to celebrate writers, nature, and community at the annual Watershed Festival. For an update on the "State of the Planet," join National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Robert Hass reading at Watershed from his poem of the same name. This year's event also features famed Beat poet Michael McClure with saxophonist George Brooks, Montana Poet Laureate Sandra Alcosser, author/cultural historian Rebecca Solnit, Poetry Flash editor/poet Richard Silberg, poet/naturalist Maya Khosla, student and youth poets from River of Words and California Poets in the Schools. Voices of the Watershed poets, curated by Nevada City poet Chris Olander presents Guarionex Delgado, Grace Grafton, Indigo Moor, Margo Pepper, Chad Sweeney, and Jennifer K. Sweeney. Smooth Toad, country blues music with G.P. Skratz, Hal Hughes, and Jean Robertson, will play throughout the afternoon. We Are Nature open reading (sign up on site). Environmental updates provided by Kirstin Miller of Ecocity Builders and Kirk Lumpkin from the Ecology Center.
In addition to main stage readings and performances, the Festival encourages activism and involvement via River Village, an exhibit area for environmental and literary organizations. There will be interactive nature and art activities, including a fifty-foot poetry rubbing panel carved in the form of a river from storm-salvaged trees. In addition to environmental groups, literary presses, organizations, or magazines representing any aspect of the creative writing community or any literary subject matter are warmly welcome! To exhibit, download a registration form: http://poetryflash.org/WS07.html/.
They also need Watershed Volunteers! If your organization provides two (or more) volunteers to help set up, take down, and everything in between, your registration fee will be waived. You're also invited to attend the post-festival reception to meet the poets and writers. Coming on your own and still want to volunteer? You'll receive a free Watershed T-shirt and refreshments at the Green Room backstage. You're also invited to attend the post-festival reception to meet the poets and writers. Plus, you'll be an essential participant in a truly inspirational event! To volunteer at this year's festival: http://poetryflash.org/volunteer_form.html/.
Today in NorCal poetry:
•••Wednesday (7/25), 6-7 PM: Hidden Passage Poetry Reading at Hidden Passage Books, 352 Main St. in Placerville. It's an open-mic read-around, so bring your own poems or those of a favorite poet to share, or just come to listen.
______________________
MEXICO
—Gail Entrekin
There is not exactly anything to fear.
—Lucy Brock-Broido
In Mexico, the stomach rebels in small ways
unrelated to Montezuma or fish washed in well water.
It happens long before any specific event
or figment can trigger it, sometimes even
on the plane over those black deserted
crags, vistas of brush and dirt heaped in pointed
cones of desolation finally yielding to the luminous green
patches like mirages, a landscape dotted with false hopes,
resorts and charming villages painted by an optimistic
child in one corner of this ugly canvas
where you could perish in dust,
never be found.
It’s the total unfamiliarity,
the unwelcome, the wall of heat you can barely permeateas you descend the metal stairway to the tarmac,
clutching your straw hat, the sun unleashed by the thin
indifferent atmosphere — the veiled or imagined hostility
in the eyes of the dark-skinned worker,
his dirty blue jumpsuit like a prison uniform,
a third world bandana tied around his head.
You have come to play and you are willing
to pay for your fun, will slide those 20-peso
notes into the brown hands of drivers,
bellmen, waiters, and tell yourself
this is their job. But when you ask
the driver tells you he never takes vacations,
never goes away. They never stop doing
what they do for you, whenever you
wish to spend.
That brown worm
curled at the bottom of the Cuervohas entered your belly like a dark night
and the first pain is telling you
there will be hell to pay.
_____________________
SOMETHING COMING
—Gail Entrekin
We are beginning to understand something
of what is coming, to go beyond sensing a shadow
in the woods watching us, and to see it take shape,
see it coming toward us across a field, zigzagging
as it does, now standing idle and watching the sky,
now heading directly for us at a trot, and realizing
that we are seen, that it will find us no matter
what we do; we are slowing down.
We are
greens of this raw springtime, to stay upwind
of it as warmer breezes pick up and buffet the leaves,
the grasses, tossing everything in a moving salad
of life, we sway on our legs, trying to move with
the air around us, and we stop thinking of what is around
the next bend in the path, stop planning our next
escape route, and begin to merge with the moment;
we have slipped into a painting by Van Gogh;
something is coming again across the fields and we
are open as sun flowers in full bloom
to these last moments on the earth.
_____________________
PREPARE TO STOP
thinking about hurts and slights,
taking them out of their black box
as you drift near sleep,
crooning over them,
caressing their long pain,
their years and years of sorrow
jerking you awake again
just as you begin to drift,
forcing you to look at them again,
clear your head:
prepare to stop this practice.
Prepare to stop
formulating letters and speeches
in which you have a bone to pick
but express yourself with restraint,
candor, eloquence: magnanimous & kind.
Be magnanimous and kind.
Let it all go.
Let the computer sit brewing its tiny messages,
mumbling to itself in the sunlight on the desk.
Press Off. Walk away.
Let the message machine sit gasping
with its burden of unspoken requests,
its frantic red signal unheeded.
Go, unperturbed, from the command center
into the kitchen.
Pass the stack of letters,
catalogs and bills jockeying for positionon top of the pile, pushing and shoving
each other when your back is turned,
frozen momentarily into a precarious balance
when you glance their way.
Walk out
to the garden. Let the dog come too(and the cat pass carefully in). Take
your cup of tea and the piece of chocolate
in the pocket of your shirt. Stop
to press your face, avoiding the bee,
into the wet lace of the lilac bloom
beside the door. Prepare to stop
getting ready. This is not preparation
for life. This is life.
This is life.
—Gail Entrekin
_____________________
—Medusa
Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their POETRY, PHOTOS and ART, as well as announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com (or snail ‘em to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726) for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.)
SnakeWatch: Up-to-the-minute Snake news:
Journals (free publications): Rattlesnake Review14 is now available at The Book Collector; contributors and subscribers should have received theirs by now. If you're none of those, and can't get down to The Book Collector, send two bux (for postage) to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726 and I'll mail you a copy. If you want more than one, please send $2 for the first one and $1 for copies after that. Next deadline, for RR15, is August 15. VYPER6 (for youth 13-19) is in The Book Collector; next deadline is Nov. 1. Snakelets10 (for kids 0-12) is also at The Book Collector; next deadline is Oct. 1.
Books/free broadsides: June's releases include Tom Miner's chapbook, North of Everything; David Humphreys' littlesnake broadside, Cominciare Adagio; and #3 in B.L. Kennedy's Rattlesnake Interview Series, this one featuring Jane Blue.
ZZZZZZZ: Shh! The Snake is sleeping! There will be no Snake readings/releases in July or August. Then we return with a bang on September 12, presenting Susan Kelly-DeWitt's new chapbook, Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree. See the online journal, Mudlark, for a hefty sample of poems from her book; that’s http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/. Also coming in the Fall: new issues of the Review, Snakelets and VYPER [see the above deadlines], plus more littlesnake broadsides from NorCal poets near and far, and a continuation of B.L. Kennedy's Rattlesnake Interview Series—including an anthology of interviews to be released for Sacramento Poetry Month (October).
