Saints Alive!!
Greg Fuchs and Joanna Sit
Come hear these brainy and charmant poets wax rhapsodic!
6:30. Wednesday, October 1, at Ceol
Ceol
191 Smith Street
(between Baltic and Warren in Cobble Hill) Brooklyn
(2 blocks from the F train stop @ Bergen)
Excerpt from Songs of December
You said once I was your twin…
who knew when we were
separated? Once the eye
blinks, the parting done, nothing
quite the same after. Seems like we’ve had
lifetimes of practice, years of rehearsals,
to offer up ourselves, to be
torn apart, cut away, again
brushed together, two fires
ablaze then die
out in frigid winter,
leaving one body
aglow with some knowledge
of the other. Who else knows
that sting of brevity?
And I don’t know
how to tell it —
And I don’t know
how it happened.
I’m only the magician’s assistant
in crystal bra and harem pants
busy carrying knives, arrows, torches.
The careless prophet who made us
had since gone. Reason too, gone.
What remains: a rusty scalpel,
a handful of tangled wires
and tiny clumps of clay, proof
of amputation. No one remembers
how long ago that was, but we both
know the body has its own memory
of being there. Now,
it’s December in the drifting city.
It’s my birthday, and our origins flash,
disintegrate, a lost pearl glows
like rapture. What am I made for
if not for you? …’
-Joanna Sit
Joanna Sit has taught literature and creative writing at Brooklyn College, NYU, the State University of New York and now teaches writing at Medgar Evers College. Her work has appeared recently in The Tonapah Review, The Relief Journal, Natural Bridge, Fickle Muses, and Poem. Her long poem Bitten by an Unusual Fly was included in the anthology Monologues From the Road, published by Heinemann Press in New Hampshire. She has work forthcoming in Seneca Review. She translates Chinese poetry and recently traveled to Hong Kong to study Cantonese Opera.
Say Goodbye
For Gianna Chachere & Valerie Massimi
Never ever acted our age
You too can have a secret blog
But to what end, when you are only cat
With cool tiger stripes makes you Beckett faced
The man with muscular calves
Loves men half his age
Even if he didn’t tell him that the bed
Was wet, the girls partied until the bottles empty
The hurricane caused a disturbance in all our minds
Music of angels only temporarily salves
What is lost in the memory
A city forms identity
The city is gone, so what can we be
In the dispersion it is leveled and understood
That the powerful will keep power
At all cost, the cost of any living being
Tender is the night, journey to its end
-Greg Fuchs
Greg Fuchs is a writer and photographer living in New York City. He has published and exhibited his photography widely. Fuchs’ latest book is Metropolitan Transit, a collection of poems, published by Isabel Lettres, a Brooklyn-based small press. He is the author of Bored of Education (Rock Heals, Baltimore, 2007), Came Like It Went (BD Books, Washington, DC 1999), New Orleans Xmas (Range, Eureka, CA 2002), Rolling Papers (Furniture Press, Baltimore, 2005), Temporary (Unarmed, Minneapolis 2004), Pieces of the Sky (Dusie, Switzerland, 2006) and Uma Ternura (Canvas and Companhia, Portugal, 1998). His poetry is included in the following anthologies: An Other South: Experimental Writing in the South (Loyola University Press, New Orleans, 1999) edited by Ralph Adamo and Bill Lavender; DC Poetry Anthology 1999-2000 edited by Alison Cobb and Jennifer Coleman; Thus Spake The Corpse: An Equisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow, Santa Rosa, CA 1999) edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal. Fuchs has performed at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, the Writers House in Philadelphia, and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery in New York among many other venues.
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