Sesshu Foster's Blog, page 7

Vermin on the Mount Reading in Highland Park, October 30

Join us for a night of irreverent readings with Sesshu Foster, Andrea Kleine, Janice Lee, Allan MacDonell, David Ulin and your host, Jim Ruland.

BOOK SHOW, 5503 North Figueroa St, Los Angeles, California 90042

7:30 PM OCTOBER 30

Jim Ruland asked me to note “an unusual event that occured during a reading”:

At CSU Dominguez Hills after a reading I gave, there was a line of people getting books signed, saying hello or asking questions. One tatted rockero kid with shaggy hair said, “You know, in your book, City Terrace Field Manual, you wrote about a woman who was murdered. That was my grandmother.” I didn’t really know what to say, or expect what he was going to say next. “My mom told me to give you this letter. She asked if you could give it to your mom. She said to thank your mom for being so kind to our family after my grandmother died. She always remembered your mom’s kindness. She said she made my mom’s Halloween costume, and helped her get to summer camp. She could’ve come tonight, but she’s in Washington D.C.” I did give the letter to my mom, who is now 90.

An Apple, an Orange for Calif.

California, once you were 8th largest economy in the world with resort hotels looking west over the Pacific sunset then you turned to an derelict mall at the edge of the Nevada desert, by the L.A. harbor.

California, I stood in the wide fields under the endless wind, California, I saw you flying, I saw you hover, vast, above me.

California, we scribbled in your crowded little classrooms, we believed everything you told us, “See—children—Abraham Lincoln, he studied by candle light in a log cabin somewhere in wild Illinois so you could become anything you ever want to.”

California, where the parents’ dreams and hopes mulched in the soil and the medians, were chopped like bark spread beneath the trees, evaporated like fog on a sun-blasted beach. California. Where parents watched tiny figures and wondered if that was their kids in the distance as the sun set.

California, those were some great, golden times. I heard they turned the old apple processing plant into a shopping center.

California, “Cumulus brilliant against the blue sky, fog blowing through the groves and orchards,” that’s what it said on the gate.

Some cities were labyrinthine marketplaces where animals were flayed alive for your delectation, some cities were mazes of astonishment— barren avenues and boulevards where imagination was reduced to ashes and stubble in the faces of the young. Calif.

Calif. asphalt stench of pavers laying new tarmac for miles first thing on a still cool summer morning, before everything heats up, before the sunlight is crackling, electric… before the kids spill out of the rows of white clapboard houses into the sunshine, yes, Calif.

California, how did we know you’d genocided the Indians in your mind, you’d used the skulls of their children for teacups, in your Victorian shit shirts, in small rooms with velvety black curtains of tradition.

Of course, Calif., the mythologies of La La Land, pioneer days and free enterprise for all turn out to be stitched from human skin, still wet on the inside. Manzanar, Tule Lake, Poston.

Oh Calif., that’s where my dreams and imagination were born, in the blood at the corner of Mickey Mouse’s mouth, in the trickle of saliva or tears slapped into and out of a girl’s face, into and out of a boy’s face, into and out of a dog’s crushed spine, into and out of regular moments on ordinary streets.

California, I was speeding along when I felt the wind through a tunnel in my mind, bitter mountain chill of glacial time exiting through the back of my head as I rushed forward, Calif.

Calif., really you know, some people were so decent, so decently they watched their children crushed, dangling like reddish eucalyptus leaves.

Calif., I admit I just stood and watched to see what you would do— not so pretty, not so pretty, illusions you didn’t even believe. Mist like cigar smoke of war.

Calif., the death penalty you instituted but didn’t believe it, the mass incarceration you enforced but could never reflect on, devastation on all sides you allowed but could never consider, the people, Calif., the people… in their generations… you buried them under freeways and movies that perfected the narrative origins of schlock. Something like movies but was a machine attached en masse via sound.

Calif., the facts and refined kernels you point to over and over hid the truth and nothing but the truth, all the facts just cockroaches scurrying about crates down on the loading docks in the produce yard.

What you love is obvious, Calif. and it’s not you—it’s not you, California—you don’t love your own strange soul.

You look out in the darkness and we see your eyes, California, from the other side. East of Eden, Calif.

All the bodies have been released into space, between the stars, between electrical bonds and fiduciary bonds, between the Americas, California. All the wisps of gas from bodies and mouths, from fissures.

The white people were in the front room eating, California, while we looked out across your face, Calif. And, what did we see besides Chinese food, besides canned spaghetti, besides the U.S. Army, it was you.

You gifted us sweet fragrances of some kind of promise, palmed off the promise of mud and denim, promise of glass and bone. Little stories, snatches that you thought somebody ought to believe, but you didn’t pretend to. —Calif. with earthquakes.

So that’s why I love your bleak Calif. chill to the end of time, to the bottom of the Pacific, rolling at me, at us—someone paid the highest price. Shaking out of their bones. Out of the world.

But then come Monday… Monday everybody gets up to go to work, until the end of this world, Calif., end of this continent, end of this civilization, end of this thought.

California, Jim Morrison is buried in Paris but his dreams were flipped at UCLA and turned on on Sunset Blvd., Ray Foster’s ashes scattered east of the General Sherman sequoia, at Fisherman’s Beach in the Marin Headlands, and under the blood orange in my backyard.

Calif., those tortillas you have been eating have turned you into steel. Under the palm fronds, under the eucalyptus, under the smoggy scrub hills. Tortillas of adobe.

Here I come California, what’re we gonna do now? You know neither of us can ever forget the right way. I hate my dreams are so lame, so stupid, worse than anything you can finagle.

Tingle-ling-a-ling, Calif., let’s get everybody fed, let’s go., Calif., you know that you know. Everything is everything, and we gone. This is where we went—you and me.

A Los Angeles poet’s revolution of everyday life by E. Tammy Kim

Aljazeera America profile, September 6, 2015

“As gentrification sweeps the city, Sesshu Foster has quietly become the poet laureate of a vanishing neighborhood”
http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/9/sesshu-foster-los-angeles-street-poet.html

photo by Jessica Ceballos

You May Have Seen This Postcard

maybe when they were attacking—black & white—a man on the run—another man with a big gun, a man in the shadows with shining eyes like glowing tubes in an old radio, girl in slinky attack hair, watch out—keep alert for further details on a secret channel, so they sent flying saucers, they sent Godzilla and gargoyles, flying monkeys with bat wings, they sent John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, they sent fleets of aircraft carriers and destroyers, B-17s and B-52s, they sent secret agents, laconic cowboys and martial arts experts who could smile with a devilish grin, they sent guys with snake-oil pompadours like the spokesman for General Electric, they sent waves of super heroes with magic powers, women in bikinis and stiletto heels, Fu Manchu and Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney and Charlie Chan—they were all sent into the nightmare of burning cities and collapsing continents, through the bubbling mists of sinking Atlantis and Lost Kingdoms of the Congo, they sent Tarzan and Jerry Lewis, they sent Bugs Bunny and all the rest of them into the fiery maelstorm, they sent guys driving fast cars even faster, they sent musculature of Mister Universe and Hercules, they sent tough guys growling out of the corners of the hat pulled down over glinty eyes, they sent wave after wave of attacking Indians and Nazis, Japs and barbarian warriors, Zulus and big-headed aliens all falling in a hail of late night static, in a blizzard of bad reception and rabbit ear antennae, they sent them all (even dancing girls, slapstick comics, dashing leading men) to other planets and outer space, they sent them all to hellish combat against sneering villains with cruel mannerisms, lame-ass dialogue the only thing they had to defend themselves, and “yet against all odds,” against even imagination and reality both, against both actuality of human lives as they are lived (so-called, “the human condition”) as well as more imaginative intelligence, they somehow prevailed—they won! we were saved. yay.

Remembering Wendy Baker (May 24, 1959 – August 18, 2015)

Wendy, Jimmy and I were talking about you (though you remain unknown to us) and salamanders, baby rats, tadpoles, lupines, and condors.

We hiked through underbrush of poison oak in redwood groves on the creek in Soberanes Canyon recounting how far we got with John and Paul.

We talked about winter rain, about (unknown) houses, (unknown) rocks, (unknown) time and the trail and (unknown) you. Talking about all the unknown things.

Dry rocky high slopes on the ridge were furred by this year’s rains, furred with invasive grasses like rattlesnake grass.

Prickly silver thistle stems bent under coronas of whitish spikes and rich violet petals, Wendy touched the wild (dense) purple delphinium. The briza maxima drooped everywhere their shiny greenish rattlesnake rattles. Winds whirled out of the sky at hand.

At the rock outcrop Jimmy said his iPhone said we were 975 feet above the sea; we ate sandwiches overlooking the broad ocean crashing on the rocky shore with a distant cloudbank obscuring the far horizon (Wendy said she heard sea lions and I listened)—turkey buzzards and redtail hawks above.

We had not stopped talking about housing foreclosures, government support for Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, AIG and the bankers who destroyed the economy, it was facilitated and nothing done to prevent it—they make the wars go on and on—the kids are told to make their lives in the devastated economy in a shrunken, withering culture.

Grass on the high slopes marked with California poppies (poison oak cannot abide the dry rocky slopes)—there’s a protein in black Western fence lizard blood that kills Lyme disease from ticks—(sunning) living and dead lizards on the trail (the ticks live off the lizards that eat millions; Wendy said she’s seen lizards with ticks on them)—they go together. We described it as we talked about your (unknown) time.

Wendy Ann Baker
May 24, 1959 – August 18, 2015

Wendy Ann Baker, 56, passed away at home surrounded by her loved ones, in Salinas, California, on Tuesday, August 18, 2015. Wendy began life in Niles, Michigan on May 24, 1959. She was the third of five girls born to Allen John Baker and Maude Ann Fahrbach. Wendy spent the next five years of her life channeling the spirit of her pioneer ancestors, who settled in southern Michigan and northern Ohio, playing in sand dunes along Lake Michigan, exploring fields and forests and canoeing with her sisters and parents. In 1964, her family moved to Hanford, California. The stay was a short one and in 1965 her family moved to the Miranda area in the giant redwoods where she started grade school and played among the ancient giants. Wendy and her family moved yet again in 1970 to a remote community on the edge of the Trinity-Siskiyou Wilderness area. Here she lived in a log cabin with intermittent electricity and attended a one-room grade school. Wendy’s family finally settled in the northern Sacramento valley in Gridley, California. In 1974, Wendy lost her mother to cancert at the young age of 14. 

Wendy attended high school at Biggs High and transferred tyo Monterey Bay Academy in Watsonville. During these formative years she realized a deep sensibility for Nature. Indeed, growing up, she enjoyed every Sabbath after Church in some outdoor activity with her family. To Wendy, Nature was the Sanctuary.

Wendy went on to attend Pacific Union College where she pursued her interest in Botany. She later decided on a life of service and graduated from the Maurine Church School of Nursing and served the community as a nurse for thirty years, most recently in the outpatient surgical unit at Natividad Medical Center. Wendy had an incredible work ethic; she believed in the importance of quality care and strove to deliver a high standard of care to her patients. She met her husband of 27 years, James Lew, while working at Natividad. They were blessed with two daughters, Zoe and Zephone, to whom she was a most devoted mother.

Her passion for botany and the natural world never waned. She was an avid hiker. Many were challenged, her husband included, to keep up with her pace during many treks of whatever mountain trail she ventured. When she was first diagnosed with breast cancer, just days after her first surgery she was back out hiking, much to the surprise of her surgeon, who coincidentally ran into Wendy and her family on the trail. She lived life with passion and intensity.

One of her favorite places to hike was Soberanes Canyon in Big Sur, especially during the spring when wildflowers abound. Wendy lived life with eyes wide open, curious and aware of the world. She loved the ocean, whether it was the warm waters of Oahu or the kelp filled ocean of Carmel. The beach was a place she always enjoyed with her family.

Wendy often voiced the peace and solace she found in the outdoors and in nature’s beauty. The physical reaction and mental stillness found in the first view of a sunset or a blooming flower, or in walking along the water’s edge was something she encouraged her daughters to experience and pursue in their lives.

She also had a keen appreciation for the ridiculous and enjoyed a good laugh. AShe sent her daughters off to many a school day with a hula dance in the driveway and songs like, “4 Hugs a Day That’s the Minimum.”

Wendy was not afraid to say what she thought and stand up for what she thought was right. She inspired those around her to do the same, to be responsible and compassionate. She lived good food, music, gardening, using her body and new experiences. She derived immense joy from her family and friends, who were very, very important to her. 

Donations in memory and in honor of Wendy Baker cane be made to the Natividad Medical Foundation, to help support its healthcare programs in the Salinas Valley among local citizens and farm workers—among women and children, many of whom are indigenous, for whom Spanish is a second language. 

Donations can be sent to the Natividad Medical Foundation, P.O. Box 4427, Salinas, CA 93912

for more information, see: https://www.natividadfoundation.org/

For more information on the Indigenous Interpreter Program, see https://vimeo.com/121533120

August Postcards 2015 #1

For Terry Wolverton

A collaboration with Terry Wolverton:

Terry Wolverton asked me to send her four ‘poetry prompts’ so I did, including one by CA Conrad.
Terry sent me four prompts, which were basically phrases.
I sent her these responses: https://disarticulations2015.wordpres...
In response to the previous 4 prompts she sent me these: https://disarticulations2015.wordpres...
Using the exchanged language, we wrote these two poems:

 

For Terry Wolverton
by Sesshu Foster





burn down the world, because the beer in front of you sweats in its glass
because of a hot pastrami sandwich, pastrami with mustard
because of the glasses, the cars, everyone rushing somewhere
because of a TV and the announcer’s voice
because of the cat locked in the bedroom, because of anything, because of the trees
because of so many in cars rushing in fading twilight, enamored of darkness
burn down the world,
burn down the world





outside the world, everyone is okay, doing things they imagine
outside of the world, you dragged your intellect to mass graves and prison
outside of the world, anything is prayer, nobody practices at childhood
outside the world, those who entered the glinting pain and came out
outside the trees, those who entered the green, you and nobody else
outside the world, those who entered the trees and disappeared
outside the world, you and nobody else
in front of you, you and nobody else





I cover the floor in salt,
there you will find yourself
next to anyone, next to many men who die themselves
I cover the floor in fading twilight,
there you will find yourself
like a crack in your hand, because you are convinced,
because you are certain, next to poets and many who answer the press of time
I cover the floor in similes,
like similes of wire and reason, there you will find yourself
next to the TV of childhood and the announcer’s voice
let these reasons remind you of a handful of names,
a handful of days

HELL’S ZIP CODE

by Terry Wolverton

A letter carrier in Koreatown

dreams of women, bodies dark as tobacco

dreams of resistance, of granite and flood.

The hour is apocalyptic.

Money and fire are killing us.

Union Station decaying, no train of thoughts

will leave this afternoon, no great distance will

be covered, now the terminal is burning.

We sought a damp, vacuous sleep.

We awakened to slavery.

In Mexico City, NY, LA— we’re

rolling through markets of the colonizers

surrounded by dead, Eurocentric thinkers.

Where do we exit this head space?

Where is the clock forgotten?

Across this continent females and males no

longer couple, busy themselves annexing

the lonely minutes, but there’s no where to park.

We no longer see the other

across canyons of sentiment.

Spanish broom rises over the mountains, but

we can’t drive there anymore, no vehicle,

no gas. No place not covered in black asphalt.

What is your vision worth to you,

already dispelling in clouds?

It’s the cumulus that leaves me furious.

Is this a prelude to light, or are we like

the thin dogs that wander the pitted highway?

We flit within parameters;

got a ticket but can’t take flight.

see: https://disarticulations2015.wordpres...

Terry Wolverton:
Terry Wolverton has published several collections of poetry, including Shadow and Praise (2007), Embers: A Novel in Poetry (2003), Mystery Bruise (1999), and Black Slip (1992), which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Her novels include The Labrys Reunion (2009) and Bailey’s Beads (1996). Her memoir, Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building (2002), was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, won the Judy Grahn Award from Publishing Triangle, and was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award.
With novelist Robert Drake, she has co-edited numerous anthologies, including His: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers (1995), Hers: Brilliant New Fiction by Lesbian Writers (1995), and Blood Whispers: LA Writers on AIDS (1991). She collaborated with choreographer Heidi Ducker and Collage Dance Theater on the performances subVersions and Under Eden.
Wolverton lives in Los Angeles, where she has taught in the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA Writing Program and Writers at Work.

postcards from the Trieste branch of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines

Political Economy and a Big Hair

Because Phil Spector’s hairdo attacked Don King’s job Barry Gordy’s Motown Empire crashed down, kicking to death degraded women in the street, “Stop in the Name of Love” burst from my nostril in streaming rivulets of scarlet blood.

Because late model Chevy Camaros obliterated children of Dodge Chargers and flung bits of them in the teeth of Pontiac Firebirds, undercover cops were left with no other option than to firebomb financial daycare centers of Goldman Sachs and HSBC, that’s why my left arm stopped functioning.

Because a fat bag of marshmallows viciously assaulted mini-Oreos with a mop handle in the janitor closet at Thomas Jefferson Middle School while Sally Hemings High School burned to the ground under the Cloud of Suspicion, that’s how my leg swole up and the skin popped open like a newspaper rack full of meat.

Because the Boston Celtics opened fire on Tiger Woods with deadly precision and their tiny needle guns, filling his eyelids with 172,200,000 gallons of oil and billions of gallons of fracking waste that resulted in instant glaucoma-style night blindness and projectile vomiting inside of my heart. 

Because the Creature from the Black Lagoon performed unlicensed colorectal procedures upon Godzilla, having reached all the way inside to extract perfectly formed Scarlet Johansson-style Tom Hanks from under the roof of the monstrous mouth like a slag heap of molten smoldering Congolese, my appetite turned to rust and disintegrated.

Because Dick Cheney flagellated Richard Nixon with an unimpeachable replica of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s the size of a fattish malignant pancreas while everybody was watching the Hiroshima show replay over and over on somebody’s bald spot, I took a wrong turn and desecrated my arm till the bone went way, way wrong. 

Because rainbow kale was permitted to engage in the foulest acts upon cowering investment portfolios of watermelon radish and regular kale, the pinto beans and black beans separated into Genocide on the left and Slavery on the right, amputating my testicles. They were my favorites.

Because the picture windows operated with wide-ranging infanticide and homicide on the door jambs and porch lights, aided by the Secretary of the Treasury Timothy KBR Halliburton who okayed the weapons sale (of toxic fluorescence, emitted from fungal pores via his muzzle), I could not control my vertigo and fell forward on my hard crusty face.

Because the cylinders of Coolness and disks of Righteousness dismembered and vituperated African and Syrian refugees inside fresh Mexican cheese even if they had died already, many times dead and thin and gray, thoroughly impeccably dead and softly cheese-like, crumbles, my teeth grew numb and shattered like ice.

Because the stench of Universities conflicted with the heat and humidity of Auto Repair at teen hangouts far above the Landfill where Motels watched TVs pop in the flickering light of small thinking, decapitating 50,000 Mexicans formidably according to the crushed little bird that I first thought was a piece of paper, which meant I was grown sick with very very sickness.

Because Death Valley took violent exception with aluminum baseball bat to the skull of the Colorado River on a failed Thursday, the Missouri infected Hacienda Heights with candy-colored pustules of iodine-131 and caesium-134/137 or bulbous hanging tumors of 10,300 millisieverts per individual (if you can call them that) in the local (U.S.) population, but who gives a piss? Certainly not me since I found myself permanently attached by my member to a catheter box.

POWERS FOR THE DAY !!!!!!!!

PICK UP TO FOUR and SEND A CHECK FOR $5 EACH and we will send the secret password to download files direct to your “Heart Drive”—

“O-PINYONATER” Pinyon pine in Western CO that believes everything you tell it

“Emotional Lock,” attach to whatever you desire

“Connect-the-Dots,” when you see spots

“Nobody is There,” when somebody is there

“Hole in Your Ideology,” so you can see yourself

“Neon Smile,” turn it on when you leave

“ASPIRIN OF GRAVEL,” available everywhere

“Yucca Spike,” FOR EXAMPLE

“PERSONAL ACUITY,” not for everyone

“Favorite Shirt,” now you have something to wear

“Cardboard Sky,” add your own weather

“Black and Yellow Striping,” in order to proceed

“Plastic Chair,” go sit outside

“Preying Mantis,” friend

“COWBOY BOOTS,” stomp dance on the moon

“NEW KID,” meet the New Kid

“A Piece of It,” to re-attach MEMORY later

“Beige Tone,” applicable anywhere, including Journalism, academia, job-related, etc.

“Jeffrey Pine-ator,” RESONATES MEANING

“Little Stick,” to hit yourself

“Borderline Illusion,” to play with

“Mechanical Finger,” does what you say

and, ONE DAY SPECIAL ONLY:

“UNBROKEN YEARS,” replacements (it all comes back)