Annual Poetry Contest

Gravity and Light announces the second annual poetry contest. Poets may submit up to three poems, no longer than 40 lines each. Send cover page with name & address, & contact information: phone, cell phone, and e-mail address to: couring@sbcc.edu. Deadline for entries is April 30, 2007. Only electronic entries pasted into the body of an email are accepted. In the subject line, write Contest Poetry Sub. Winning poetry will be published at Gravity and Light in early May.

Writers at Work

I'm honored that one of my poems is featured at Writers at Work during February--the month of my father's birth 90 years ago! Please click on the link above.

Stories I Want to Tell

Peter all in blue
flies from Mr. McGregor
drops one shoe
in cabbage
another
in potatoes.

My hero
outwits this farmer
every garden turn.
Forfeits jacket
before slipping
under gate.

In my story
Peter finds me
outside with a pink suitcase.

But don’t mistake us
no Alice and Mad Hatter
no Grace and White Rabbit.

We are Chella and Peter
in a wood at dusk
far from family noise.

He tells me his grandfather
sacrificed his own tail
to save Otter.

I want to confess
my father shoots otter
bruises me
when mother’s not home.

I want to say
some pain is worse
than dying.

Peter holds my hand
under the harvest moon
stars floating downstream.

First Published: _Phantasmagoria_ (vol.5, no. 2), ed. Abigail Allen.

FROM JUAREZ
(after a photograph by Miguel Gandert)

I'm Teresa Gutierrez. Look at me. Alive.
Not like my friend Cecilia Covarrubias. Shot
once in each breast and tossed in a field
where nothing grows.

The next day I ask my cousin to work
his magic. Tattoo the Blessed Mother.
Clothed with the stars and sun.
Spiked light down my back.

He lines and shades
week after week.
I flinch and turn away.
See our Lady of Guadalupe
rise out of my jeans.

Carry her with me.

To the maquiladora.
To dark streets after the second shift
crossroads where the bus stops.

Her mantle around me.


First Published in _Confluence_ (vol. 17, 2006), Ed. Wilma Acree

SENTENCE PRAYER

May heathens roast in hell like chickens on a slow cooker,

prays my Sunday School teacher. I see Homer
Lee Masters, splayed on a grill, fingers dangling
over coals. Hear him crying like a shot dog.

Sweet Jesus, cleanse Homer of whiskey and loose women,

she asks at Easter, warning us about the sin
of slow dancing like that hussy Salome.
I see Mama lean on a gentle wind, swaying
in the kitchen to Sinatra’s croon

I’ve got you under my skin, deep in the heart of me.

Nobody’s going to shame my mama
so I beg Sweet Jesus for an angel
to swoop down and carry that teacher away
drop her in a fire with slow-cooking chickens.


Chella Courington
From _Oregon East Magazine_ (vol. 37, 2006)

When Monkeys Fly

Below me lives an actor. The director spots her long nose and skinny ass.
Casts her in a huge role, Richard III. She screams My life for a horse's ass.

The super accuses me of jamming the toilet and flooding the apartment.
Two hours you cost me, he yells and threatens to shove a firecracker up my ass.

A guy doing shots at the bar declares a butt like mine deserves headlights.
I reply excuse you big boy and knee him in the crotch. Life is full of ass.

At rehab they say apologize for behavior under the influence.
Apologize? Whatever I do drunk I'd do sober. They can kiss my ass.

Mr. Johnson pokes me with his chalky finger, and I rise out of my desk.
Moon Pythagorus and his disciples, dropping my Levis over ass.

Me? I love glutes au natural. No fancy tattoo, no lacy French thong.
Swinging my backside in open air, just denim rubbing against my ass.

Ghazal by Chella Courington first appeared in _Poemeleon_ (vol. 1, issue 1, summer 2006)

Iris Online: Jane Eyre

Here's a poem featured in iris online in 2005.


JANE EYRE TAKES TO CYBERSPACE


Tired of midnight screams in drafty rooms
she imagines a jaunt down lover’s lane
like a walk on the moors
to distract her dampened spirits

if she can make it on match.com
through questions
more questions than any governess agency
dares to ask.

She wants to speak the truth
though truth often brings her trouble.
So this time she’ll slip
into white lies.

Plain? Not Very
Exciting? Somewhat
Sexy?Very

Lying is fun.
She can turn herself into a babe
by clicking keys.

Who cares if Rochester waits for her
the other side of a burning house.

She’s sick of gloom
of being the model for every wallflower
in every century.

Longs to be a hot young star
even Barbie would emulate.

To shine in cyberspace.

Pyromantics

the father
shouldered
the boy
who twirled a baton
tipped in red
while the father
swallowed
long rods of fire
snuffed out somewhere
past lips
and over tongue
hidden behind teeth
yellowed from nights
tasting sulfur
as giants and dwarfs
with floppy orange shoes
snaked
into dollhouse windows
dangling toes
between me and the boy

and i was nine again
walking
over hot coals
dumped
from the grill by dad
who bet ten bucks
i couldn’t do it
and i said i would
if he would
and i did
and he laughed
wiping his hand across his mouth
me standing there in burnt feet
crying

with time came a vision
branding his back
as skin sizzled

his fingers
tapers in a church
that i lit
one by one
snuffing each flame
so he’d smolder
before me


Chella Courington
From _Oregon East Magazine_ (vol. 37, 2006)

Creative Writing Community Online

Dear Poets,

Following is a notice of an online Creative Writing Workshop at Cerro Coso Community College and facilitated by Professor Gary Enns. During the next couple of weeks, guest poet, Sterling Warner, who teaches at Evergreen CC & has just come out with a new book, will comment on posted work. This CWC is a productive, supportive community of writers and critics. Please
check it out.

METAMORPHOSES AND THE CWC PRESENT
The Online Creative Writing Workshop
with Poet Sterling Warner
October 29-November 11

All are invited to participate online, contribute creative writing,
discuss craft, and/or ask the poet questions, so encourage your
students to join, and log in yourself! Feel free to forward this
message. Here are some directions:

HOW TO JOIN AND PARTICIPATE
----------
1. Click the CWC Moodle site link on the following
page:
http://www.cerrocoso.edu/metamorphoses/cwc.htm

2. Follow the directions on the right of the screen to
CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT and become a participant.

3. Email me here to let me know that you've joined. I
will add you to the workshop group so you can participate.

From: Gary Enns

What is Poetry? Video including me

Here's a video of three poets in the Santa Barbara area made by Jonathan Cline.

Go to http://current.tv and search for topophilia.

The first video that shows will be "What is poetry?"

Watch it & vote.

Thanks, Chella

my poetry for a change: Immaculate

heavens, i haven't posted for more than six weeks! "what happened?" you ask, dearly faithful reader. well, august turned into september: students, essays, committee meetings knocked & i answered. but now i've returned to gravity & light with my own poems, newly published & ready for blog exposure.

disclaimer:btw, these are long lines arranged in couplets. if the format breaks the lines into long/short, know that the short lines belong with what's above it.

IMMACULATE

Mama warned me if I slept with a boy before marriage the Virgin Mary would snatch
me away. Where to I was never sure. Maybe New York or Los Angeles. To a bedroom

of satin--sheets so smooth I’d slide into Heaven. Tony was my first. Tall with a dimple in his
chin, he liked to pinch my butt up the stairs to civics. Twenty-four steps with him right behind.

In March he gave me a broken heart on a silver chain. Kept the other half in his front pocket.
A good luck charm he said. Never thought about being swooped up by Mary when I kissed

Tony. Felt him grow in my hand like giving birth to something I wanted to know.
Mama believed virgins hung the moon, though not a soul in our family ever stayed that way.

Cousin Raylene was living proof. Did whatever she wanted. The Virgin never messed with her.


_Soundings East_ vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006).

Vespers by Lousie Gluck

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.

From The Wild Iris, published by The Ecco Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Louise Glück. All Rights reserved.

Marie Howe

How Many Times

No matter how many times I try I can't stop my father
from walking into my sister's room

and I can't see any better, leaning from here to look
in his eyes. It's dark in the hall

and everyone's sleeping. This is the past
where everything is perfect already and nothing changes,

where the water glass falls to the bathroom floor
and bounces once before breaking.

Nothing. Not the small sound my sister makes, turning
over, not the thump of the dog's tail

when he opens one eye to see him stumbling back to bed
still drunk, a little bewildered.

This is exactly as I knew it would be.
And if I whisper her name, hissing a warning,

I've been doing that for years now, and still the dog
startles and growls until he sees

it's our father, and still the door opens, and she
makes that small oh turning over.


From THE GOOD THIEF (Persea Books, 1988)

Tin House Dorm

At Reed College, the dorm where Ted & I stayed reminded me of the school in _Harry Potter_ as well as Flowers Hall at Huntingdon College, my teaching post previous to SBCC. Gothic architecture with big redwood rooms. Mike Land, dear friend & also a participant at Tin House, took this photo with me & poet Susie Dunn in the foreground.

D.A. Powell

I just spent a week studying with the imminent poet, D.A. Powell, at the Tin House Workshop in Portland, Or. He is a wonderful teacher as well as poet. In appreciation of the week in his workshop, I post the following poem from his most recent collection, _Cocktails_:

[the cocktail hour finally arrives: whether ending a day at the office]


the cocktail hour finally arrives: whether ending a day at the office
or opening the orifice at 6am [legal again to pour in californica]: the time is always right

we need a little glamour and glamour arrives: plenty of chipped ice
a green jurassic palm tree planted. a yellow spastic monkey swinging

a pink classic flamingo impaled upon the exuberant red of cherries
dash of bitters. vermouth sweet. enough rye whiskey to kill

this longing: I take my drinks still and stuffed with plastic. like my lovers
my billfold full of rubbers. OPENs my mouth: its tiny neon lounge



From Cocktails by D. A. Powell. Copyright © 2004 by D. A. Powell. Reprinted from Poets. org.

SECOND MEMORY

Like Marilyn in her glory
an upward draft
catches Mama’s hem
at forty-first and twelfth
raising it in waves
around her knees and over her thighs
a pink-striped dress
dances like the awning
at Lida’s Cantina
when a man at the corner
clutching a boy’s hand
sees Mama naked
under her flying skirt
and I see he sees
wondering why
she doesn’t hold it down
and he sees me see him
winking
before the light turns green.


"Second Memory" by Chella Courington appears in _Permafrost_ (vol. 28, summer 2006), published by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Anna Akhmatova

Russian (Ukranian) poet, Anna Akhmatova, was born June 23, 1888. According to Joseph Brodsky, who introduced _Poems_, selected & translated by Lyn Coffin, Akhmatova's father forced her to write under an assumed name: "When her father learned that his daughter was about to publish a selection of her poems in a St. Petersburg magazine, he called her in and told her that although he had nothing against her writing poetry, he'd urge her 'not to befoul the good respected name' and to use a pseudonym. The daughter agreed, and this is how 'Anna Akmatova' entered Russian literature instead of Anna Gorenko" (xiii).

"Lot's Wife"
by Anna Akhmatova
Translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.


From Poems of Akhmatova, by Anna Akhmatova and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Published by Little, Brown & Co. © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Granted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agency. All rights reserved (poets.org, linked above).

"Blackbirds" for My Father

This is a recent picture of my father and me taken during my visit in Alabama. Below is a poem written in his honor and published in the inaugural issue of _Poemeleon_, an online journal of poetry edited by Cati Porter. Click on the above title "Blackbirds" to visit _Poemeleon_.

Blackbirds

Like a canopy of darkness
they shadow the ground for miles
on currents that lift them
back to their roosts.

Years later I ask my father
if he gathered us
to watch thousands
swoop down on trees
sit wing to wing
until morning branches cracked
under their weight.

At daybreak did they leave the oaks
bare?

He says we never saw them abandon the hollow
catch a new wind to an unharvested south

but often would pile into the car to see their return
black streaks on the upward drift
of a September afternoon.


Chella Courington
June 2006

Visiting my dad in Rural Alabama

We spent three weeks with my dad in Albertville in North Alabama at the tip end of the Appalachians. The locals like to eat lunch at the Albertville Candy Store, a kind of general food/trinket store on Main Street. In the back the older ladies play bridge three times a week.




Here's a typical daily menu. BTW, the Candy Store serves lunch Monday through Friday. Come as you are.

wishes for sons

lucille clifton is one of my favorite poets. she speaks so honestly about being female.

wishes for sons
by Lucille Clifton

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.


Copyright ©1991 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted from Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., 260 East Ave., Rochester, NY 14604. Poets.Org