7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members

A native of Portland, Oregon, Beverly Dahlen has lived and worked in San Francisco for many years. Her first three books (Out of the Third; A Letter at Easter; The Egyptian Poems) were republished by Little Red Leaves Editions in 2012. Parts of her long open-ended work called A Reading have been published over the years by various presses. She has recently published work in the anthology ATTN: July 31, 2015 published by Further Other Book Works. Beverly Dahlen is a recipient of a 2013 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York.

Susan Gevirtz’s books of poetry include AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger, Kelsey St., 2010; BROADCAST, Trafficker, 2009; Thrall, Post Apollo, 2007; Hourglass Transcripts, Burning Deck, 2001. CIRCADIA is due out from Nightboat in 2016. Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson, Peter Lang, 1996; and Coming Events (Collected Writings), Nightboat, 2013. She teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. Gevirtz has co-organized the annual translation and conversation meeting of The Paros Symposium with Greek poet Siarita Kouka, and guest organizers Helen Dimos, Eleni Stecopoulos, and Liana Sakelliou for ten years.

Sara Larsen is a poet living in Oakland. Along with David Brazil, she co-edited TRY magazine for many years. Chapbooks include NOVUS, A,a,a,a,a, The Hallucinated, Merry Hell and After Sappho. The bookAll Revolutions Will Be Fabulous was released by Printing Press in the fall of2014. Her new full-length book, Merry Hell, is forthcoming from Atelos Press.

Beverly Dahlen

            smoky white a simple country wine that
            smacks of citrus crisp pears     & sweet
            peaches    with just “a hint of grass” on
            the tongue at the finish    lingers & deep
            ens as the evening swirls on          as the
            stars proceed as Venus rises        as the
            moon sets         as the planetsboth near
            & distant           rhyme with one another
            turn & curtsy    kiss goodnight      move
            to China     then to Russia           France
            England waking in New York           &
            stretch across the plainsdeeply scarred
            furrowedwith rain

            come at last to California the northern
            coastal valleys      mist in the vineyards
            at dawn

BD
February 24, 2014

Susan Gevirtz
from CIRCADIA

when the sky

always cracking up

covers their heads

electrocuted thorn sunset
rest torn from

those on

the Devour and Ravenous tour

faceless kleptos
zero-in birds of prey

tooth and crave
have it all to yourself

dark clutch

Now to sleep, sweet silverware in a drawer

shut-up by the shock of plenitude

Your somniloquy and teeth grinding
never done

and so our love

hunger abated by a fictitious meal

Sara Larsen

from Merry Hell

eveni bit the dust my price is slaughter heli o polis

accounts in arrears debtshells bone-dead creatures lay outwith out cons
ciousness

on the beach conchshells endless strikes of light ening patrimony’s digging out
of
eye

to approach fear you must go upside-down      sail underside     rounded earth whe re

                                                                                                                                                ocean surges
space
where my bureaucratic purchase of a $4 latte drops out

i see the hemoglobin of my dead comrades soft as watermelon

i see my grandmother unseize all ropes linked

Aphrodite’s seafoam wave washes up the corpse and decay

False starts is curated by Steven Seidenberg (falsestartsreadingseries@gmail.com)

The Lab

False Starts: Beverly Dahlen, Susan Gevirtz and Sara Larsen