Miramar publication party

Saturday, February 21 –  a Miramar publication party

EP Foster Library 

in the Topping Room at 3:00 pm

651 E. Main Street – Ventura 

host and publisher, Christopher Buckley

Poets reading include:  Polly Bee, Susan Chiavelli, Angel Garcia, 

Timothy Sheehan, Phil Taggart, Emma Trelles, Jackson Wheeler, 

Florence Weinberger, Kim Young, Gary Young, Perie Longo, 

Glenna Luschei, Friday Gretchen, Marsha de la O, John Ridland, 

Mary Kay Rummel, Elijah Imlay, Geofrey Jacques, 

Shelley Savren, Fernando Albert Salinas, 

Miramar is published out of Santa Barbara and publishes poets from

all over the United States.  An inclusive journal that combines the past,

the now and future of poetry with the caveat, Miramar publishes poetry

and commentary; old school truth and beauty.

From issues 2 & 3

Malena Mörling

She Kept on Shouting

Just as the airplane

was taking off, a little girl

in a pink, ruffled dress—

(hair, curly and blond)

sitting just a few rows ahead

began to shout:

—Where are we going?

—Where are we going?

—Where are we going?

and while the plane buoyed up

on the air’s tilted

and invisible conveyor belt

she kept on shouting—

until her voice

collapsed,

as if the bottom of it

had dropped out

as the earth

dropped off,

became something else.

A new, strangely

distant and dizzying

thought

none of us would ever know

how to touch.

Ruben Quesada

Lament

This star has been dying, God.

And if the ancient seahorses and whales

could flee, they would surge into the empty sky.

Watch their tails trail into the distant future like lonely comets

their dying light haunting the darkness,

where anything is possible.

Do not be angry with us. Let us resist the painful weight

of death, the worthless ghost of this daily life.

Gary Young

Driving from the valley to my home in the mountains, I saw persimmons and

pomegranates bend spindly boughs almost to the ground. In every direction

there were trees marking each farm with a pattern distinct as a fingerprint—

date palms, blue spruce, walnut, cypress, olive and sycamore surrounding,

protecting and dwarfing a farmhouse and barn. There were rows of peach

trees, their trunks swollen over the grafted rootstock, and grape vines thick

as my thigh. Every hundred feet an owl box sat perched on a pole. Dust

rose behind a tractor, billowed and trailed away in a pattern identical to the

clouds that stretched across the sky. Cotton bolls gleaned from the fields

by a persistent wind dotted fences and the thorny weeds by the side of

the road. The cemeteries were filled with flowers, as if a feast were taking

place, a party, a wedding. Almost home, I glimpsed the fluorescent rust of a

Dawn Redwood about to drop its leaves. I’d driven past that tree a hundred

times before, and never noticed it.