Sesshu Foster's Blog, page 17

For Ryan and Umeko

 

2 in the rain sheets of caffeine and ecstasy, shivering in feathery yellows of muskeg.

2 riding garish summer blue of joy and intent, riding and peering down deep green swells.

2 in furled sheets of pink dawns, rooms of northern light shine thru flesh like smoke.

2 in the automative spaces of swollen USA, driving the mind’s clean speeds.

2 in the shivering sedges and rushes, whose passions verge like timbered slopes. 

2 in abrupt exaltations of the morning, voices from the radio fading like tenderness fades.

2 along the sunset shore of wine and dreams, snapping twigs and branches into a fire.

2 by the lanky dog in a flock of sanderlings, where kettle or kettling is a word meaning a flock that flies up in unison, wheeling and swerving.

2 at the edge of a rolling, tumbling Pacific, where yellowlegs, sanderlings, and sandpipers fling themselves up at Knot and at dusk.

2 in the virtual numbers of the digital world, where algorithms of skin smell warm. 

2 , we know which 2, not like a pair of hands, a pair of shoes or anything else, or even 2 droplets falling out a sky full of rain or night full of stars.

Those 2, they know better than we. 

 

 

 

A MINOR by Ray Foster

( “- the soothing key. “)

-for Mom and

Gramma

 

I pray for togetherness

I must put all the energies;

compassions; creativeness;

ingenuities; feelings-feelings

for ensemble , feelings for where

I hurt others, for where I

thrust too hard, too fast; call

up all my enthusiasms,

exuberances; call up all

my love

I praise the sun

its warmth making the

world so much more fun,

adding colorful flowers,

play, new energies, new

growth got body, food-

inculcating, germinating

re creating

the rain

its cleansing, nourishing

the wind

its spreading seeds

the earth

to its desert centers

the water

to its ocean centers

the aloneness

source of all creativity

the cold

sets sugar; brings people

together; reestablishes priorities

this is incomplete as I am

incomplete as i always will be incomplete- except dead

-there, it might be where there is nothing more to be lost; it

might be freedom; it might be

beauty, it might be complete

it sports* a changing countenance

as I do. as I keys,

prayers and praise

as I do

living

live

 

*sport here refers to

the phenomenon like a field of red poppies,

one of precisely the same kind, for no reason

flowers white.

 

Ray Foster

San Jose 4/20/80

 

Kaya Press 20th Anniversary Reading City Lights Bookstore April 2014

http://www.citylightspodcast.com/kaya-press-20th-anniversary-celebration-at-city-lights/

City Lights celebrates the 20th year of Kaya Press with readings by Sesshu Foster, Gene Oishi, Amarnath Ravva, and Shailja Patel!

Kaya Press is a group of dedicated writers, artists, readers, and lovers of books working together to publish the most challenging, thoughtful, and provocative literature being produced throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas. Kaya Press believe that people’s lives can be changed by literature that pushes us past expectations and out of our comfort zone. They believe in the contagious potential of creativity combined with the means of production.

 

 

Another summer arrives

keep it coming, concrete dinosaur.

keep it coming, berm of sand.

keep it coming, invisible waters.

keep it coming, month of air.

keep it coming, shadow man.

keep it coming, el radiograma of wind.

keep it coming, weird candle.

keep it coming, fingernail butter.

keep it coming, rationale of yucca.

keep it coming, sideways door.

keep it coming, whining ache of bruise.

keep it coming, little miss yellow.

keep it coming, tortilla biters.

keep it coming, black and white hotels.

keep it coming, automotive planetoid.

keep it coming, polished spots.

keep it coming, smudged years.

keep it coming, tipping bird heads.

 

photo by Lindsey Bolling

 

 

Another summer is here

red plastic rooster

wax coin machine dribs

white porcelain automotive establishment along main street

photographic magazine fragrance

swollen USA

fields like froth on beer

as seen through translucent skin

magnetic animals

not so very many populations

afternoon’s golden light butter

eat something tacos celery

electrical towers

milk of lacquer

Francisco Toledo insects

vast distant thundering booming

partial somewhat material

bowling alley populations

stimulant cell numbers

short lived stench reeks

shadow man

bird skeleton spaghetti

automatic while transfer

watery fat

plastic bag dribbles

stereoscopic motion

as seen through translucent skin

house is saying

pole is saying

object is saying

Tomas Transformer eyelids

opening secretion of a moment

banana and scorpion whim

one or another

 

 

 

 

That One

That some people who are divided within themselves, against themselves, will turn on you to force you into a kind of slavery for some minutes, or hours, or days. Because they must, for they are divided against themselves.

 

That skyline or roof line of the massive apartment building, or the idea of it made of cardboard, that rides high above my own life in the evening. Lit by street lamps.

 

That I have come upon the bones or carcasses of coyotes and rabbits and mockingbirds or other birds and have seen the bloody opossum, half crushed and unable to rise, shaking and grimacing but trying to drag itself from the pavement where it has been run over in the evening, in its blood, it has described how death comes.

 

That the axles of the vehicles carrying a person or persons carried to a world destruction or to happiness.

 

That a vehicle or vehicles merged into traffic, some passed on ahead, while others stopped

 

That this world is the world of an Italian movie, the action filmed first and afterwards, all dialogue overdubbed.

 

That two day old coffee, drunk like that, cold.

 

Ragazzi

I hear them before I see them from across the parking lot, hooting and calling

out on the street, two boys on skateboards surging up Main Street, another boy on a bike ahead of them, heading west toward Fremont.

I emerge from the sliding glass doors of the market with my sack of soup vegetables.

I never get a clear glimpse of them, don’t really look at them as I cross the parking lot. Because I feel like I already know them, so I don’t even bother to look.

I am shifting the sack of goods as I walk from one arm to another, avoiding a Smartcar turning at me, reaching for my keys with my free hand, already making my soup in mind after 3 days of bad cold or flu. But I have registered them as they rush lanes of traffic on Main Street to the opposite side. I like how the boyish shouts rebuke my indifferent silence.

They cross the twilight median under the big ficus trees for the far sidewalk.

They cross over into twilight shadows, charging through them like figures of speech in some poem.

Like flying horsemen or like ravens, like this or like that metaphor, boys with the changeable energy of boys, like figures gesticulating in dreams or like the boys we once were. Rushing out on the horizons of their own lives like pronghorns.

Crossing into the twilight shadows I don’t even distinguish let alone really see, the boys like ragazzi in the background, extras in some black and white 1960s Italian movie.

But partly I am listening to their voices, which have crossed over to the other side.

No break in traffic, no emergency screech or sound of accident, twilight assumes the flow into evening. I set the sack on the passenger seat, drive out of lot into twilight myself. I catch a last glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye as I pass, the bicyclist keeping pace with the skaters in front of the boxing club and the Jehovah’s Witness churchfront, heading toward Carroll’s Brake Service, but already I’m ahead. They’re just half-seen figures barely inscribed inside a couple lines here; they’re on their way and passed far beyond, throwing giant shadows across a blue evening.

 

City Lights Bookstore, April 2014

 

Evelyn Dear Postcard

“1986

Evelyn Dear,

 

Warmest greetings from a dear Friend,

—Leah”

 

Evelyn Dear, warmest greetings from a dear friend, “1986″

somewhere 1986, somewhere it had to be

it had to be 1986 (I’m reading Transparent Things, Evelyn Dear

Vladimir Nabokov writes the pitiless erasure of time very well,

Evelyn, have you read him?) Dear 1986 Marina was six and Ume one

I was teaching in my first year, trying to learn to teach

trying to find something to help the kids get thru

(the CIA-special crack wars were cranking up full blast Evelyn Dear,

they’d leave some 10,000 dead in L. A. in two short decades, unremarked by so-called national leaders,

Evelyn Dear) after I left East L.A. for college, firefighting throughout college years in Wyoming and Colorado,

Craig Colorado’s rolling country, canyons and jutting mountains southeast of elk and aspen in Browns Park,

the Green River winding and roaring through the Gates of Lodore in Dinosaur National Monument,

I returned to the hometown and put my shoulder to it in the neighborhood, you know? In the old neighborhood,

maybe somewhere in East L.A. it’s 1986 oh Evelyn Dear, Leah says so, she sends you Warmest greetings, what was she thinking?

me too, in the midst of fucking Reaganite America, Evelyn Dear, he was turning America into the shithouse of dead ends, jails and wars it is these days for most kids,

so we were organizing in East L.A., talking in meetings, arguing in meetings, phonecalling lists of phonecalls, carrying an agenda full of notes, organizing anti-war protests against the wars the U.S. was fomenting and arming in Central America (genocide of Mayans happening

again, as if reiterating the Spanish Conquest with Israeli machineguns and U.S. helicopters) we demonstrated for daycare centers and against war,

we demonstrated for bilingual education and against war—we got a few more daycare centers and lots more wars.

If it was 1986 again should we have done different, Evelyn Dear? Is it still 1986 somewhere, what do you say?

What else could we do and what are you doing now, Evelyn Dear? Monday we fly to NYC, to attend the college graduation of Citlali,

who wasn’t even born in 1986, never knew the weird euphoria and terror of the 1960s, never had a whim or flash of the burnt out whimsy and grim hope of the 1970s,

never saw a generation turning first to drugs and rock and roll then to evangelical Christianity, never saw the rest studying meetings and politics and things, Buddhism and

back to the land (those communes all abandoned now, except?)— Only knows the economic “restructuring” (income redistribution to the rich) of Reagonomics going full steam through the 90s, Evelyn Dear

like America was rebooted without the New Deal, without the War on Poverty, instead we got the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on the Poor

Grenada, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Lebanon, Panama, Bosnia, Serbia, Palestine, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan

can you imagine, Evelyn Dear? I bet you can, I bet you can, if I can imagine your mind Evelyn Dear, it’s like a warm summer night in your mind,

I look up in your mind, Evelyn Dear, you got the Milky Way pouring through the whisper of leaves like Wyoming in the warm wind blowing a summer night

Under the stars twinkling in your infinite thought, I so look up to you, your dear Friend

 

by Meredith Moffett

 

 

 

 

What are the purposes of fiction?

 

 

The purpose of fiction is to propose truths through conjecture.

Fiction does this in two ways:

• It reveals the hidden, often secret interior lives of people—their emotions, their thinking, their spirit.

• It questions and counteracts the on-going narratives (myths, ideologies, habits) that people believe and live, especially as they are unaware of them.

 

 

ABC OF READING Ezra Pound Postcard

What? I’ve been working late every day getting ready to go to New York

for a week. All the buildings plasticy and transparent like skin

removed with the ocean and sunshine behind it, full of people

though you can’t see them you can feel them like wind in your

hair, like trees full of insects making business happen, increasing

vertical slices of worlds like plants in themselves, keeping green

to themselves in boiled and boiling words which speak to

plants and skies amid the card-thin cities of rotten noise

that help me be what I am, or might be soon, a swiped image

of myself and of you too, in old soft-spoken waves and shorelines

around coves of a few given Thursdays, Wednesdays, like I get

tomorrow, one or another to do (with change for tips)—