We hope all is going well. We still have some website challenges, but hope to smooth out the potholes of the cyber superhighway. It took a little past August, but we are thrilled to release our work with Denise Calvetti Michaels. This is a great collaboration we are in with Solid Ground helping mitigate poverty in Seattle. We are also grateful to 4Culture for helping bring this work into the world. Let us know what you think at cavemoonpress@gmail.com
Please check out out her blog for all the events related to her new release! Rustling Wrens blog
Here are a couple of her poems! She's also going to be at the Washington Convention Center this
Friday at 7:00 September 7, 2012.
Photo of the School at San Gabriel Dam, 1920
Boys in dark overalls are the restless image of James Dean
—blond hair slicked back, stray strands falling forward into their eyes.
Perhaps the teacher asks the children to say cheese, the long note
that unifies them like a song, like an anthem, the depression
and the war to come.
The boy who will become my father wears a long-sleeve shirt
and smiles for the camera as all the children do.
Maybe my grandmother packed his knapsack with salami and goat
cheese, dried figs and apricots—abundance a concrete thing—reach
for it and it’s passed down.
He still recites, for me, at ninety, his first lesson once written in chalk:
Travel and read. No one can take this away from you.
- Denise Calvetti Michaels
We Were Traveling South
On Highway 101
down the Oregon coast
with our little dog, Jazzy,
and all that one carries
Torn typewriter ribbon
dredging light
tendril clues
and the questions, Angie, my youngest, asked,
about my writing,
how I begin,
and the answer that came to me later,
crossing the border into California,
when this story came back:
Once upon a time we tired of picking lettuce
and wandered away, down a furrow,
sun disappearing behind distant hills marked by shape-shifter oak,
my brother and I imagining buffalo, mustang,
and a coyote howling.
When I turn back, my grandfather is lost
to me in a glint of shimmering topaz.
This is nothing I could say I had language for
—not in the Piedmontesse dialect of my grandparents
—not in English or Italian.
First I’m a brown-eyed girl
trying to hold open the gaping mouth
of the sack that scratches my neck,
itches my skin,
smells of dust,
catches my buttons.
- Denise Calvetti Michaels
