7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm $8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members
Kevin Killian Zirconium
for Anselm Berrigan
Just when you think something is real, stable, a diamond
it turns out to be cubic…. cubic zirconium. When does our luck
change, Anselm? Is that willow tree still weeping there? Two lifetimes I’ve
spent hunting the fake and pasting glitter into the holes. Does that laddie
with the twinkling eye sad and happy not to see me there.
Next time our luck will change: I’ll knock on the rock, a huge crevice will appear,
with you in it, like that old- time sword standing up. The past and present king,
once and future Spring.
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Claudia La Rocco "Wish you were, wish I were”
for kes
It’s funny to get flowers when you’re traveling You can’t keep anything
Eastern bloc skies the right-wrong shade of orange electric-green stillness
Why didn’t I tell you certain things?
The hero walks in, walks out The extras have no sense of propriety I wonder about getting just what we desire.
The preamble at the butcher shop: My, what big eyes you have
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Tongo Eisen-Martin Channels to fall asleep to
While shoe box to shoe box travels my childhood
Professionals roll garbage cans around a conference room Half the size of a holding tank Half the hope of a holding tank Full of third world retail flattery “nothing wrong with the blind leading the blind,” we think they just said
porcelain epoch succeeding for the most part dying for the most part married for the most part to its death
when a hostage has a hostage that is u.s. education
stores detach their heads and expect you to do the same when you enter
God says, “do not trust me in this room”
Two fascists walk into a bar One says, “let’s make a baby.” The other says, “let’s make three… and let the first one eat the other two.”
your sky or mine read from the book of pool room enemies
“I’m the best kind of square. Poor and in love with the 1960s. The first picture I ever saw in my life faded from my storytelling a long time ago.”
Not even ten years old And most of you are on my shoulders
The store’s detached head smiled
casually be poor teach yourself how to get out of this room and we’ll leave you enough blood to turn off the lights on your way out
casually be poor… they are all cops when you are poor
Kevin Killian is a San Francisco-based writer and artist. His books include Impossible Princess, Action Kylie, three volumes of Selected Amazon Reviews, and Tony Greene Era. Recent projects include a novel, Spreadeagle, and Tagged, nude portraits of poets, artists, writers, musicians, etc. In 2017 Nightboat Books published Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997, a capacious anthology Killian co-edited with Dodie Bellamy.
Claudia La Rocco is the author of the selected writings The Best Most Useless Dress(Badlands Unlimited, 2014) and the novel petit cadeau (The Chocolate Factory Theater, 2015). animals & giraffes, her duo with musician/composer Phillip Greenlief and an ongoing roster of collaborators, has released two albums: July (with various musicians; Edgetone Records, 2017) and Landlocked Beach (with Wobbly; Creative Sources, 2018) Her poetry and prose have been published in 6X6 #34: I Like Softness (Ugly Duckling Presse), Imagined Theatres: Writing for a theoretical stage (Daniel Sack, ed; Routledge), On Value (Ralph Lemon, ed; Triple Canopy), et al. She has received grants and residencies from such organizations as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book of poems titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series.
