Gold Coast Writers

Six Vultures

2010-02-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Circle and ride a carousel of sky,
unmistakable from below, charred
V’s branded under gray wings
fired black before the empty sun.

Something caught scenting up from
a green winter meadow, some bit
of remain left by shrewd canid or
natural calamity, something given
over to the end of some purpose.

I sight them with my camera
for looking at later: gatherless
T’s of onyx pepper against blueborne
salt, in measured passes seasoning
slow shadows in a still terrain.

Circles, more circles, until they
unspiral as pulled string to vector
toward deep mountains where
something else rises to take them
away into what they are, into what
they recoil unerring to become.

Joseph Gallo
February 15, 2010

The Poet In Layers

2010-01-18T20:36:00.000-08:00

We weren’t born to become onions,
but the gardens beneath our roving feet
often say otherwise. With the sun comes
a flesh-hugging Lycra, something to pull
us tightly into ourselves lest we fall out,
lest anyone sees the fruit hanging saggly
unselectable, how the seasons decrepit us.

Next, something looser to overhide the
corseting, preferably with ribbed neck
of spilling turtle so the turkey won’t show.
Over this the open denim jacket that says
a poet lives here as there are pockets to
prove it, penned little ditties tucked in
each one, the ink run bled and blotted
from years of washable forgetfulness.

Remember now to add the scarf to
loop under collar and lapel, the snaking
ensemble coiled above kickabout jeans
or a faded picnic print skirt that would
spread cotton for a tablecloth, then slip
into calf-high black boots because this,
this is what a poet is supposed to look
like and unless we don the eyeless onion,
drape fabric deep in textured obstacles to
model as if it were a mantel of office, how
will one know to inquire about the peel work?

Joseph Gallo
October 2, 2009

Silence In The House

2009-12-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

Silence moves through
the house like a thieving
monk, the mutestruck
cricket huddled where
candlewax won’t fall.

Songlessness swells
to swallow the windows
snapped shut against a
terrible calm pressing
in from all sides.

So are the days when
ewes’ milk is scabbed
with hoarkissed memory,
a vervain aftertaste
flushing your damassine
mouth where word nor
wind dare pass beyond
a thousand bled breaches.

Sip fool’s water then,
the weepworn issue
of what days to come
might bring in rain
or the lack of it.

Mind your new mother,
her hushthread skirts
dancing the dimwashed
walls like a thin shadow
singed in umber Gypsy.

Pass here without feet
for to step through is
to violate the first law.

Joseph Gallo
December 27, 2009

Shelter

2009-12-10T21:26:00.001-08:00

He wants to change the world

only because that is what art

does. He wants to stand

in a high place and draw it all

into himself –

all the mass and movement

of it, the music and time

and bleeding, surging life –

and let it sit quietly in a space

within him - near his lungs -

where it can breathe in and out

with him, bearing away the hours

and the small, animal sounds

of pain; and near his heart,

where it can find a new rhythm.

Something less a locomotive

than the sea.

And when it has rested

for the years it takes a tree

to stand and live and die,

he'll take it out and set it

softly on a table in the sun.

There are follow-up thoughts on this poem over at my blog, Metaphor.

- Kyle

Shelter by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Thanksgiving

2009-12-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

The bird: splayed on the plate having
lain the last mile of its road to ruin,
glazed by loving ovens, its eloquence
tabled in the funerary mouth, drawn
and stitched-up like a hasty conclusion,
docile as blood-drawn cranberries.

The family: elbows down, heavy with
caked aspic and sticky tradition, rituals
arriving at truths run from only the
day before, choked with aftertraffic,
diesel still fuming in the hair, eyes
shifting like side dishes being passed
over halfless glasses and obedient utensils.

The meaning: lost as Pilgrim trinkets,
strewn out one harsh winter after another,
flurried shapes moving through trees
and the dining room furniture to settle
in chairs we occupy for the briefest of
time, nodding, smiling at each another,
passing the light, picking through the dark,
cupping warm biscuits in tendering hands.

Joseph Gallo
December 2, 2009

The Animals

2009-11-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

The sun would never rise at all

if not for animals who conjure

morning and call it down

to warm them where they lie,

having slept the night in places

dark and cold. The blue jay

summons light to warm

the concrete bath. We owe

the cat our gratitude

for bringing rays of strong

and dusty light into the house,

especially to the shoulders

of the sofa by the window

where she sleeps.

And if not for horses, cows

and elephants the sun

would never reach the fields.

The lizard owns the light

that finds his rock

and dolphins play to bring it

on the waves. So I thank

dog for all the light I see.

Kyle Kimberlin

11.29.2009

Dulcetea

2009-11-27T16:05:00.000-08:00

We move like this, sweet pangs
on a tongue of honey, our mouths
met to their true purpose, no song
save the savor of a kissless food
whose nutrient is thus needed by
the body if it is to continue in this
solemn manner. Cue measures
from medievality, some tender
gride of pernambuco to bend
the bowing bones; let us fall
together through histories yet
to come. I have missed you in
all our misgivings, mornings
slept apart like owls who lose
the day to sacrificed moons.

We hold like this, bitter aches
rivering through the marrow,
our limbs woven through the
sky like migratory birds who
carry the architecture of breath
and sigh to pass high overhead.
Observe ritual as we dance from
one fretful misholding to another,
surrenderless secrets we keep only
for ourselves to bear as gifts laid
at the feet of others as if for the
first time. I have kept you within
an occluded place in time, when
our scattered instruments fail to
remind us this was ever music.

Joseph Gallo
November 1, 2009

Coyotes In Rain

2009-11-11T14:31:00.000-08:00

It comes to remind them
this is what they are: given
to the canter of their nature.

Rabbits run as blood runs
uncaking from autumn coats.
Showers cleanse predation.

See them arc and cavort
over downwood and scrub,
foaming beneath heavy cells.

They will excuse this unnoticed
intrusion, allow what eyes may
follow toward a trackless source.

Joseph Gallo
October 13, 2009

Blessings

2009-11-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

Breathe

An opening

A releasing

An acceptance

Of what is

An invitation

Into the core

Of my soul

As I breathe

I stretch

I embrace my willingness

To invite the goddess

That lives within

To pour out of me

Like a waterfall

I drop into the center of my being

And like the sun

I rise again

To meet the divine

That connects my very essence

With the stars in the heavens

As they guide each of us

On this journey

We call life.

- Mary Pat Nally

November Story

2009-11-05T14:43:00.000-08:00

Sea fog obscures the meadow, douses
starry dewlight that caught sirens for
the sun, mutes voices we once saved
for one another to flash position from
ventured seaborne hearts. Morning is
a martyr for metaphor—the hidden frog
bleating oxygen in a hedge; a moist
warbler simmering sexsong in phantom
folds of smoky field. Somewhere in
all of this, our story. What it says, who
can say. Between edges that reappear
and recede, nothing is certain, not even
this day. Wet coyote moves low against
her red hunger. Hunt sustains the hunt.

If something changes we might never
know. A small chapter in featherscatter
may read to conclusion in the dirt. This
might have been us. What we give to
this may define what we are incapable
of giving. Mist notes every marker of
courage even when we cannot. Some-
where, rabbit struggle. Scrub holds
silent. Sun sweeps out a call. Meadow-
light answers. Woodwren and bowerbird
respond. Day gathers to materialize.
Everything resumes as it must.

Joseph Gallo
November 3, 2009

October Shower

2009-10-29T15:51:00.000-07:00

How quickly the body forgets. The window
open for summer balance of blue heat and
cool water is closed now against windfury
spilling down the canyons. The traces you
left along the terrain of my back, when we
wore summer side by side, have vanished
before an overgrowth of time. How quickly
the body forgets. Dizzying kisses in a brief
doorway, the brush of night breath in a slept
change of position, the errant skim of an
arm or leg, the temple of your belly pressed
against my pilgrim mouth, silent with devotion.

How quickly the body forgets. Skin comes
into cold as if it has never before been, all
the lessons lost and deftly retaught for the
body is a distracted student, preoccupied
with whatever it seeks to again misplace.
How many times has the light held it
in a dawn that arrived only to subside,
illuminated life in the dying as something
else vied for remembrance and reckoning?
How quickly the body forgets you, fails
to recall the vanished articulations that
made of us bonds we thought unbreakable.

Joseph Gallo
October 28, 2009

Ablution

2009-10-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

I wash your feet, not with tears,
not with my hair, but with what
your soles give to my palms—
their long treks and lostabouts,
their loveless pacing along the
bent spine of a widow’s walk
dowsing for the sun or word
from someone who may have
sailed off the edge of the world.

I wash your feet so that they
may again become the wings
you set out to be born with.

Joseph Gallo
August 22, 2009

Watermelon

2009-10-13T01:22:00.000-07:00

Child, if you care to remember

this world, this life

you dream like a path

of certain distance quickly

walked and centered on a hill,

if you care to open it like

watermelon in summer

or like a prayer box

bearing a constellation of crosses

and sunsets, I hope

you consider your father,

his overtures to death

his music, and like sunlight

through the sprinkler

on a simple greening lawn,

his smile.

Kyle Kimberlin
2009

The Fissile Ship

2009-10-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

She waits as if for torches to come cutting for her,
their acetylene kisses hot, searing, separating sea
from pooled bilge oil and equatorial crossings too
numerous to recount. Her decks are a maraud of
dead rust gathered from the black skirts of Africa,
siphoned from the torn spine of Indonesia, a greasy
malaise lathed by disease and insufferable assault.

She would list to the core at the keel of the world,
fall straight through to the Outback to settle drydocked
at the red side of a sacred stone no one remembers the
name of. Harbor kliegs scrape turreted blades of light
across her swollen flanks, hesitant to linger any longer
than necessary. Voices bleed iron in petroleum swirls
that mismix with sharkwater to encircle whatever dread
senses dare discourse themselves toward understanding.

These might be the stories of brineworn sailors scuppered
by smoke and smuggled sorrow, doldrum tales told in horse
latitudes that lash the flogged horn to set mutiny over the
dismal rails. Dire tides have taken her stolen children to
places she will never again go. Laden with a callous cargo,
she pulls to strain at unsettled anchors that stir the bones
of all the sea has taken. Steady her gangplanks; she is ready.
There is but one last port o’ call she must yet bear steam for.

Joseph Gallo
October 11, 2009

Submissions

2009-10-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

This site was created to offer an opportunity for sharing work and networking, for poets and writers in our area.

We consider our area to be generally Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties, in California.

If you live around here, and you'd like to join us, have your work presented online, and have a chance to network with other writers and poets in the area, we'd love to hear from you.

We're accepting submissions of poetry and short fiction. Right now, there's no formal submission process; that may change if things take off.

Please send an e-mail using one of the links below to start a dialog. We look forward to working with you.

Kyle Kimberlin
Carpinteria

Joseph Gallo
Goleta

The Smell Of Space

2009-10-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

He returned inside, the outer
hatch pressurizing behind him:
“Gunpowder and ozone,” he said,
removing his helmet, to no one
who could hear him. It was then
he knew the Devil’s address, the
house where he lived, and precisely
who his terrible roommate was.

Epiphany is like this. A sudden
knowledge arrived from nowhere
and nothing that covers your meek
understanding with an immensity
that ignites awe, fear, and the rocket
engines that sprang from cave fire.

What comes after knowing, no one
can say. One thing is certain: Space
will persist until the last light blinks
out and the nose at last comes of age.

Joseph Gallo
September 7, 2009

Listening For Feathers

2009-10-01T11:56:00.001-07:00

Walk the scrubland then, turn your point
into the wind. Be still. You remember how
to do this. Be silent. Chaparral is sighing.
You will miss it if you hum or set your lips
to psalmistry. Avoid distraction and mind
your step. Rattles will say your name before
you’ve had a chance to jump, so eyes are best
given to the ground. Something is fluttering
in scarabgrass. Bend down and pluck it up.
Hawk was here. Over there, owl scat says
he sat the limb above it just long enough to
make his way that much lighter to the moon
before it cleared the ridgeline. A ripped tail
says he carried something else with him to
its heaven of white cheddar. Be still again.
Something else is caught up in drygorse,
a striped sprig of sky that could not be held
up a moment longer. Negrid beetle scumbles
toward it and if you don’t retrieve it, it may
camp stink there for an hour under its shade.
Mockingbird arias are answered by others.
Quail cast clicks and sound nervous claxons
at each intrusion of nothing, nothing that
appears to be anything to you because you
move at the speed of doing rather than being.
Listen for feathers now. They will teach you
how to come properly into this world again.

Joseph Gallo
September 30, 2009

Which Bird Breaks The Light

2009-09-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

Waiting is unlike anything else. It takes no short-cuts through time;
always the long way around through where the story lies. ~Aucassin Verdé

Which Bird Breaks The Light
For Jan

She sends me poems from the in-between place,
the place where pens are dipped into petals that
yield hues given them by rains, rains given their
reasons to release by all our sorrowless stories,
the fancy tales we tell in our sleep and send up
from deep pillows as breath to the waiting sky,
a sky happy to receive whatever is sent for it
knows it must hold everything that matters.

There are some things one can give only to another,
for that person alone and no one else, carried on
shoulders of titans, dawns seen by only their eyes
as they lie draped in veils of their mingleness like
lovers who cannot guess at which bird breaks the light,
light that cannot sense such gentle shadows as they
share, the curvature of rare geometries lost to the
failing perfection of pale tapers that chant them silence.

These are the lines she would choose, the patterns
of words that adhere to no set purpose, their dear
appearance seemingly random and without compass,
veering wildly margin to margin, mattering without
meaning to, but mattering nevertheless, speaking for
the parts of her she once believed might be missing
forever, long-slept yet stirring like the mute piston
of a bulb that moves both earth and sky but to become.

Joseph Gallo
May 4, 2009

Together In This Way

2009-09-26T08:13:00.001-07:00

We row the oars of our legs,
upriverless, not through bayou
and bitterness, but embrace
and the firefly incindiation
of eyes flashing and dousing
over and over, rekindling only
to eclipse, breath and sigh,
gait-held breath and sigh.

Were this all so simple
we would be done with
it and that would be that.
But there is more than mere
tides alone can account for.

As bows break and part sleek
water, we leave parts of ourselves
for the other to find and come
across, footprints in foam, sand
scrawl about how a sky looked
and smelled on a certain day,
whispers left in the conched ears
of shells we pass off as found by
us alone, thankful to resist the
need to minister to each mystery
we might claim as orphaned gospel.

This is one of those mornings
when the world will not make
us wait for its wish not to intrude,
so we lose it all in the quilt of our
own country, states we have crossed
off a visitor’s travel list, new ones
we make together in this way.

Joseph Gallo
June 11, 2009

Summoning Serpents

2009-09-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

Call them forth from maiden dens of cow ants
where they move limbless through cuttled darkness.

Do not ask them to stand against the rising moon
where pale moths pass to spread like Chinese fans.

You may forget the thousand details of an ordinary
morning, but you will not misremember your first snake,

how it came silently on bellied elbows to be in your
presence like a torn dress taken in the haste of lovemaking,

there more suddenly than flesh reentering flesh, water
no longer the sole immersant thriving on your tongue.

Today I summoned a king, ringed within grasses of
a chaparral Nile, ribboning like an ornament betrayed

by the absence of devoted subjects who would deify
it for no reason other than it was the lowest thing

beneath the sun. Yet the sun reached down and around
to regard it with scepters dipped in helium and gold.

This one came as sure as tapers throw softness onto
the candled back of a woman who wears your name,

who turns in that light to something nimble and lithe,
inching through kindred darknesses to find the nethered

places where cold things go to live, where prey waits as
patient as a dune to be delivered from the endless small parts

that make it what it is, to become once again something less
that the whole of its own greatness, something summonable

by reticulated mystics and hooded messiahs, ordinary as miracles
that call forth these words, the eyes you use to see their shapes.

Joseph Gallo
May 20, 2009

Mourning Twilight

2009-09-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

The frantic doves come whipping wind,
flushed as if the Devil had come airborne
to run them spooked against a newrisen
moon imperceptibly lessened from its
fullness, their tireless wings beating the sun
down over the western sill. These are the things
we miss when we fail to be still at the dusking
of the day, when the light gives up all it has
taken to come to this place. I stand as a pillar
of flesh to ford and divide the dovening as
they spill and veer from my groundhold,
birding cries as if spells had been cast at them.
Black shapes backlit become black shapes
moonlit. One orb gives over to the other, bends
the bright creatures that labored to survive from
day into gathering night, every thing advancing,
diminishing, remaining more and less perfect.

Joseph Gallo
September 5, 2009

Ruinaria

2009-09-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

We look over the edge of the world
to find what others have lost. We
seldom think these might be our
bones scattered below the threshing
rim as we peer over and into the ruin
that makes up the missing marrow
of our dear histories. It is almost
beautiful, this gazing. For a moment
we seize ourselves to press noses
against what continues on without us.

Others appear and retreat, not wishing
to worry an untenable silence that
cannot be kept beyond a failing star
in the dowsing distance, every thing
surrenderable, undisturbed by consent.

We might stand this way until a
thousand years pass, sending
ourselves henceward by blood
and providence, some minute
part of us thriving long past our
ungathered recollective. There
will we stand to gaze up at our
kin, share the strewn stories that
exist only at the end of this world.

Joseph Gallo
September 10, 2009

Weathering Birds

2009-09-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

1
In a light mist,
the cosmos settles
on her black wings.

2
Along the bare limb,
the arduous news
of the day matters.

3
One by one they
fall making even
dark birds lighter.

4
Who finds this feather
learns but one secret
the sky no longer keeps.

5
The building continues
as there is always the shell
of another breaking season.

6
Early fog and nothing
stirs in the high reaches;
waiting becomes art.

7
Sun lances the boughs
as leaves fan tools of
a passing industry.

8
If the heavens will not
have them, perhaps your
tender bamboo cage.

Joseph Gallo
September 15, 2009

Reading Announcement

2009-09-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

"Fused Realities"

Two accomplished local poets and writers, Joseph Gallo and J. Kyle Kimberlin, will share the podium, reading from their work in poetry and prose.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

4:00 pm

Presidio Springs Community Center

721 Laguna Street, Santa Barbara

scroll down for links to media

Joseph Gallo

    August

    Late birds flush the bush, streak
    beaks across a bruised horizon.

    Nightfall knows better than we
    precisely what to do with itself.

    Wild dogs skirl ritual like Pawnee,
    their plain song sere against the sea.

    Fluters hoot the winged oaks and every
    mouse shadow stands its still ground.

    To move now would be to
    do the only human thing.

J. Kyle Kimberlin

    from Pictures of My Forgetting

    You know that life is hiding from us, though
    we caught a glimpse this morning, where
    it fell as light on the carpet by the door.
    It rose and flew like a moth down the long
    hall and disappeared. As a child I saw it rest
    that way. It would lie by the window while
    morning arrived and my grandmother
    was singing in another room. It fluttered
    by and rested a while on my hand. It spread
    its wings and loved me, whispering a psalm.

    The house is gone but not that room, not yet.

Links:

The reading flyer, color web page

The reading flyer, in grayscale for printing

About Gold Coast Writers

2009-09-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

We are poets & writers in the Santa Barbara, California, area. We hope to provide a venue for fellow creative writers and poets in the Tri-Counties to share poetry, short fiction, novel excerpts, etc. Our goal in doing so is to foster communication, opening a network of creative people, and to support each other's work.

Click here for information on submissions.

Your hosts are:

Joseph Gallo

Blog: Drachenthrax

J. Kyle Kimberlin

Blog: Metaphor | Web site