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Avenue 50 Studio
and
Hollywood Institute of Poetics
It’s Autumn! Let’s FALL in love with poetry!
Please join us for our October
BLUEBIRD READING
SUNDAY OCTOBER 12th | 2PM
PROUDLY FEATURING:
Alicia Partnoy
Kenji Liu
Sesshu Foster
Vickie Vertiz
plus OPEN MIC!!!
Sign up begins at 1:45
Hosted by:
Jessica Ceballos
Books will be available for purchase and signing
as always – FREE!
2pm
at
Avenue 50 Studios
131 North Avenue 50
Highland Park, CA 90042
__________________________
the Bluebird Reading series is a component of
Avenue 50 Studio’s literary arts programming.
Avenue 50 Studio is supported in part by the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and the California Community Foundation.
Avenue 50 Studio
www.avenue50studio.org
jessica ceballos
www.jessicaceballos.com
King Kong versus pterodactyl
King Kong versus ants
Jack London versus Jack Kerouac
William Blake versus Walt Whitman
USSR versus reality
ANC versus neoliberalism
black versus night
night versus nothing
thought versus nothing
fried egg on a tortilla versus nothing
proletarian internationalism versus eco-tourism
surveillance versus subversion
crows versus ravens
memory versus dreams
slope versus angle
cliffs versus the ocean
dog versus indifference
poem versus indifference
milk versus time
habanero versus thai chile
water versus drought
Calif. versus everywhere
sleep versus eons
sleep versus the sleep of reason
dreams versus moments
bad ideas versus pig’s feet
Ray Foster versus Paul Foster
the present versus the future
incipience versus the outward manifest
solidarity versus charity
potentiality versus waste
the apartheid imagination versus mestizaje
the apartheid imagination versus actual lives
peanut butter sandwich versus salami
this thing versus the next thing
pink versus magenta
distance versus experience
Oakland versus San Francisco
Bay Area versus L.A.
happiness versus Coca-cola
bitterness versus greenery
bones versus stones
4.
I have silently fired the corrugated cardboard gun of suicide at my corrugated friend, lingering on the glare of broad Pacific as seen from high bluffs, bottles clinking, bottles and tubes looking at many (or some of us) without eyes, “flimsy excuse” for a man walking in my direction through a reflection, “mild promise” of a child thanking someone in the crowd for illnesses of dust, “pigeon wire” of adolescent corrugated friend obscured by telephone pole, writing a check for fusillade of crumpled papers which were owed to the corner of the room where the ants were reading, except for the blind ants, it turns out (all of them), pressed the corrugated friend on any Sunday as we aged in 2 dimensional houses, 2 dimensional cities filed under the subject heading, “national forest”
5.
shot by corrugated trigger of cellophane of optimistic optometry, a squirrel tail of the runned-over squirrel in the street wiggle-waggles in a wind ever full of life, buns fresh from the oven of mislaid hours, buttered with best wishes from the sweet (or not) girls, the little breezes flushing life through all these leaves and copper wires and porous ceramic folks, doubly entertaining when they dip and dither, glad-hand and foreswear; as my copper-stained friend, hurtling laterally intermittently as sonic vibrations in the greenery, would put it over lacquer tray of cardiac
1.
how about when they lay hands upon the gloomy profile, so that the glandular fear swells tumescent yellow, fatty tissue was reminiscent of a flexible, steel-framed friend, who was “modular spectacular” and “groomed arroyo”—cottage rooftops which casually descend to the level of the fences, mired in normative formulations interwoven with glad membranes (liver and aspirin) some explosions, popping noises, smoke or fumes (follicles rubbed off) once revealed as if by a receding tide, jagged crowns of rocks splashed and swirling with bubbles, dripping greasily down the paper they had pasted on the wall to cover it, the steel-framed friend (or eyeglasses, some would have it) “humidity of the poles” headed to the right “20th century straw teeth mastered by filigrees of rosy bronze as if into a sheen of air” (blistery white gum), (tooth and porcelain door knob) hand and arm reaching across the table of the landscape, unfurling disagreement and emboldening fingertips almost tapping like little balls of yarn in a fringe hanging from the curtain, so that “broken dogs” casting green “Chinese shadows” along the saline front where spots of excrement and peaches recount toilet paper rolls in alignment accordingly the hanged men of the calendar, those rubbishy fermented alcoholic notes, toward the tall immensely abbreviated folder of the steel-framed friend, not pine-scented about…
photograph by LIndsey Bolling
2
…yellow scales on the green-framed evergreen, Sino-green temperate forest map left in the car, yellowed desiccated grainery rice sheaves, grasshopper popping up into the air of Fall like summery afterthoughts, we have regular ideas about them in the Main Street plateglass, Japanese New Year plates of memory gauze smeared with aguacate-cream of swervy pulp, child weeping she said of dead greatgrandfather while she herself homeless last year, my green-framed friend turned to yellow sunshine splayed across entrance way, enemy forces and their guitars and socks and their tickets could be in Calif. or NV, or AZ, cactus bristle toothbrush mustard and watercress delight in byways and alleyways of long days gone inside long nights, thin reeds of bones played by insect messengers and amphibia in 1960’s green twilight, closing the billfold on my green-framed friend’s license, (his or her) picture of leafy shadows on headlight wall flashing past momentarily like the gantry of space rocket, chopsticks could be used to extract from car collision the bits of still useful trembling, Oakland there mighty amber “All our agents are currently on another call, please hold on the line and we will get back to you in a moment,” green-frame
3.
4-41-framed friend, 326 fan palm trees tilted in the brushfire, sugar my 4-41 on one side a sidewalk and not on the other, one side side sunny sunny and hot and hot and not not another another, 1965 Mercury Marauder sniffling choked up with sentimentalism of 4-41-framed friend, bent side mirror flying off at high speed on the Interstate, she kept you coming back, didn’t she, so? Swap old man in furnished room for old man in managed-care facility with roads, shuddering hamburger case full of articulate cartridges sparkly like thighs of juniper thought of tomorrow—which went by parade “of history”—through passive Mediterranean or Caribbean lateral differentiation we didn’t decide one way or the other, it was done by animals, the rest was holding laminated national forests I surmised, I appreciated 4-41-framed coherent sea coast you remember, the biological (hanged men of the century)
postcard to lisa
“In Chamacuaro in 1923 lightning struck the door of ther temple and many women were thrown to the floor. Eufrosina Nieto, who was one of the fallen, invoked the miraculous Saint Nicholas and nobody died.”
She got up at 7 AM and probably ran five miles on the arroyo seco, which drains into the L.A. River, when storms run out of Hahamongna watershed, a Pasadena City-owned watershed where they siphon water for their town from the San Gabriel Mountains.
Yesterday evening we hiked down into the arroyo from Devil’s Gate Dam, which holds back a reservoir full of dry white gravel. We carried a blue-throated skink and a red-eared box turtle.
They had been carried off athletic fields, which get regular soakings from sprinklers, by maintenance men and kids who delivered them to her to dispose of. We walked down the rocky eroded trail into the canyon of the arroyo in toyon, alder, eucalyptus, yucca, creosote, buckeye, buckwheat and brush, looking for water holes and found none.
Drought. Even as we drove north through Pasadena, past barriers and cops directing traffic away from some mass spectacle at the Rose Bowl, where ten of thousands of teenage girls and their moms were amassing for who knows what weird ceremonies and rituals (and traffic was royally fucked up, cops everywhere, parked at intersections, light bars flashing), brown smoke of fires rose from the south (from Chino Hills?) and from the west, smearing the sunset with rusty color.
Although she was hungry and protested against it, we parked in the falling dark and took a flashlight and walked in the dark up the creek behind the lights shining in the new parking structure at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus, with its parking lot emptying out, last workers on satellites and space projects, mars probes and secrets of outer space, project managers (one of whom we know is a belly dancer in her spare time) and rocket scientists heading home to the freeway home, an owl in the tree looking down on us as we looked down on JPL.
We crossed the first bridge over the creek and found flowing water under it. The skink was let loose in the sand by the boulders and the turtle was placed on the edge of a pool in the rocks, under white alder. It waited awhile, emerging from its shell, to stalk into the pool.
Night mountain bike riders with lights mounted on their helmets passed us heading up into the dry rocky mountains. The owl was gone. We drove to our favorite Thai restaurant.
And the Chinese kid who drowned, he is alive, though with visible brain damage—he is back in school, fighting to regain the life he lost and grabbed back. His hands shake, he has weakness and short term memory loss from the stroke, but day by day he is fighting his way back.
it’s okay that the artists are all white, even the nonwhite artists (2?) are kind of white
it’s okay that the curators are all white, it’s
okay that the l.a. reflected in this show is like the l.a. in robert altman’s “shortcuts” which is a strange all-white l.a.
(in charlton heston’s “omega man,” (1971) i think the head vampire or whatever they were who was menacing the ‘real’ last human beings on earth, that is the humans who were not vampires or whatever (all white, except maybe the black woman hipster with her militant afro) was black)
let’s not go into “planet of the apes” at this juncture, but in the apartheid imagination of the future white people are in peril, isolated with jutting jaw of manifest destiny determination like charlton heston with his guns and his alzheimer’s
it’s okay that the curators at the ucla hammer museum think that ‘minorities’ are best represented by white queer artists (that shows diversity like on “star trek” the aliens are white people who wear prosthetic make-up or paint their skin blue or green—that’s a kind of diversity)
it’s okay that the white artists who are queer artists don’t have anything to do with POC (people of color)
it’s okay in the little museum labels where the curators note the background, issues and ideas in the artist’s work, that none of it referenced POC even when it mentioned “highest rates of incarceration in the world in spite of having only 5% of the worlds population” (it’s okay not to mention that blacks and latinos make up 60% of the incarcerated even though they are 30% of the american people)
it’s okay
it’s all right, like when i sat in one day in marilyn robinson’s mfa writing class at the university of iowa and she shared her course reading list which was all white except for one book by the only black writer and only POC in creative writing at U of I, and she asked did anyone have any remarks or suggestions, and i said, apart from the one, the reading list isn’t very diverse, it’s all white
robinson didn’t answer, she just smiled and white students (maybe i was the only nonwhite in the room) said, “it’s a very diverse list, already” and “yes, for example, look at all the women writers” and “and kafka,” one added
and robinson just smiled
and i left
that’s all right
it’s okay
that was in 1994, 20 years ago
it’s okay 20 years later to walk through the ucla hammer museum through an all white show
when i was a kid i thought maybe american apartheid would slowly change
and now we have a black president who does everything white presidents do
he does everything just like them, all his policies are the same—he’s like colin powell
and in the 1990s i felt like things could change, maybe
but now i see white thinking’s not changing and this exhibit and the exhibits at every other museum in the city show this, but
it’s all right because the ucla hammer museum curated and hosted “now dig this! art and black los angeles 1960 – 1980” which exhibited from october 2011 to january 2012
so it’s okay, because “black los angeles” had its day
it had the one exhibit
it has black history month every year
it had wanda coleman (in those days)
so it’s okay that all the official museums in l.a. show white art all the time
it’s okay because you can go to the “california african american museum” if you want to see art by POC or you can drive to long beach to the museum of latin american art, or the l.a. county museum of art probably has one or two frida kahlos or diego riveras and some great precolombian ceramics
so it’s okay
if the all the other museums like lacma and moca and etc. show white art at all times
asco had it’s one lacma show “asco: the elite of the obscure, a retrospective 1972 – 1987” on exhibition from sept. 2011 to december 2011, so it’s okay
they had that one
one is good, now we can go back to our regularly scheduled programming
like after a public service announcement
it’s okay that the apartheid imagination remains in place and is not disrupted
thank you
that reassurance is like walking on a broken toe
sesshu foster
alhambra, ca
Probably you were making love a couple times, you were getting busy.
Laying sod, planting trees, paving a walkway. Perhaps you called your mother.
Perhaps your child. Driving from L.A. to the Mexican border can take what.
The estimate for the bathroom, 15 to 20K. What’s the weather going to be like, when you arrive?
Something about Gaza. The woman’s car in the intersection…
You parked and by the time you got there, two other guys showed up to help push.
Rutsu 18, or Tokoro in S. Pasadena? Bombed out buildings like from World War II, gray concrete dust.
Gray concrete dust on survivors. The Israelis.
News on in another room; saturated arena colors of a flat screen in a sports bar, Washington DC?
Dim sports bar? A toddler cradled in a hunched father’s arms, missing the top of the head.
How much had you? How much more to drink? Two or three maybe.
Phrase, tit for tat, something like that. It canceled out. How much money was it to you?
New appliances, developments in robotics, software versus hardware. Debt.
How’s traffic? How’s it look? If you peeked and saw Gaza you saw it.
You saw the end of your world, your own death in a way, the limit of sighs.
A breath, your own, and someone talking, saying something you didn’t quite catch.
Hedges, fences and trees as you drive on. Houses, neighborhoods of night streets. Little universes.
East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines 
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