another money poetry dance photo

Us coming off the dance floor. You can see the poems printed on paper with blue ribbon attached to them so they can be pinned.

money dance picture

Here's one with me dancing with my cousin. You can see one of Nick's vispos on the front of my malong.

213 by Jose Garcia Villa

from the Anchored Angel edited by Eileen Tabios

     I demand brilliance and
Consecration.  Because of a star.
How beautiful is the light like
Grass!  Love is not far
Nor your hand.
                       This being so
Love me well, love me well.
Because what Love is
I saw
           I saw Love well:
Love tied a bell
To your heart. Love said, Kiss
Him and let your heart ring.
And this is the thing.

moon and mountain

Jean sent this visual poem that reminded me of the moon rising over a California ridge. Made out of our very own invitation envelope at that!

Radiance

RADIANCE (Footnote # 72)


Tell me more of the unending radiance
your eyes discovered when pressed

against the hole into a honeycomb.
Say turquoise. Say my uncut hair

coiling around your eyes. Say berry.
Say your finger circled hard around

my toe. Tell me more of the unending
radiance erupting when eyes pressed

against honeyed wombs. Say my name.
You don't know my name? Make it

up. Then say my name. Tell me more
of the unending radiance of honeyed eyes.


------
from Eileen Tabios' I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED (Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2005)

The Cinnamon Peeler and the Pope

Two poems contributed by Bec. Thanks, Bec! Keep sending those poems in, I've got 30 plus tables to fill, plus reading poetry at this late stage in the game is comforting and relieves me of my fret and stress I feel sometimes creeping into my body.

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michale Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bard dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you would never walk through markets
with the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
through you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

        this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

                  and knew

        what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

Abyss by Karol Wojtyla
Abyssus abyssum invocat (Deep calleth on deep - Psalm 41)

You always see it as space
filled with cascades of air
where glass splinters reflect and glitter
like seeds planted in distant stones.

Now observe the abyss that glitters
in the eye's reflection.
We all bear it in us.
When men are gathered together
they shift the abyss like a boat
on their shoulder.

Nothing to bypass in this commotion.
Take a ray from the eye and write
your sign.
Though you see no abyss in the mind
don't imagine that it is not there.
Light may not reach your sight, but the boat
shifts on to your shoulders;
the abyss is clothed in flesh,
become Fact
in all men.

Carbonator Cash

Nick is sending Carbonator Cash for the money/poetry dance! yay!

Release the Wheel by Wei-Ming Dariotis

Release the Wheel

Confessions of longing are inappropriate between friends
When, within reach is a diagonal,
a Market Street,
a slicing between things north and south.
Contours used to delineate the boundaries I’ve crossed:
I’ve left my own neighborhood
to get here.

Which is a moment of yielding, so I beg you,
“Gesture, something, anything; suggest
something.” Regret everything and forget
the directions
I gave you.

There are too many
one ways
with you strapped
in over there
and me in the driver seat
over here.

On the one side, there is a downtown
on the other, an
inability
to breathe.
I feel each cell
in my body like seeing stars
shimmer in cold air.
I concentrate on the Pleiades.

They are my heart, my Noe Valley,
Just concentrate;
One breath in, one breath
Out.

Don’t make any mistakes.

On one side is what
must be said. On the other
everything
I wish could be communicated.

Just let me drive you through
the City; let’s cruise the China
Basin, hit
Twin Peaks in a snowstorm
and we would find ourselves. One
breath in, one out,
and my hand, slowly
releasing